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The Problem of the Many
John Ashbery called Timothy Donnelly’s previous collection, The Cloud Corporation, ‘The poetry of the future, here today’. The Problem of the Many sees Donnelly, one of the most influential poets of his generation, focused less on the future than the end of history: these richly textured and intellectually capacious poems often seem to attempt nothing less than a circumscription of the totality of human experience. The book contains the already widely praised ‘Hymn to Life’, which opens with a litany of what we have made extinct; elsewhere, from an immediately contemporary vantage, Donnelly confronts the clutter and devastation that civilization has left us as he strives towards a beauty that we still need, along the way enlisting agents as various as Prometheus, Jonah, Flamin’ Hot Cheetos, NyQuil, Nietzsche, and Alexander the Great.
The Problem of the Many refers to the famous philosophical problem of what defines the larger aggregate – a cloud, a crowd – which Donnelly extends to address the subject of individual boundary, identity and belonging. Donnelly’s solutions may be wholly poetic, but he has succeeded in speaking as deeply to these profound and urgent issues as any writer currently at work.
The Problem of the Many refers to the famous philosophical problem of what defines the larger aggregate – a cloud, a crowd – which Donnelly extends to address the subject of individual boundary, identity and belonging. Donnelly’s solutions may be wholly poetic, but he has succeeded in speaking as deeply to these profound and urgent issues as any writer currently at work.
- GenresPoetry
208 pages, Hardcover
Published October 1, 2019
11 people are currently reading
115 people want to read
About the author
Timothy Donnelly
15 books27 followersTimothy Donnelly is the author of The Cloud Corporation (Wave Books, 2010) and Twenty-seven Props for a Production of Eine Lebenszeit (Grove Press, 2003). His work has been translated into German and Italian and has also appeared in numerous anthologies, including Legitimate Dangers: American Poets of the New Century, Isn’t It Romantic: 100 Love Poems, Joyful Noise: An Anthology of American Spiritual Poetry, and Poet, Poems, Poetry edited by Helen Vendler. A graduate of Johns Hopkins, Columbia and Princeton Universities, he is a poetry editor for Boston Review and teaches in the Writing Program at Columbia University’s School of the Arts. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and two daughters.
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For more info, go to
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Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews
January 28, 2020
Dense and discursive, capacious and cerebral, linguistically dazzling and formally brilliant, Timothy Donnelly's The Problem of the Many is a virtuosic engagement with language, science, politics, culture, with life and death, with reality within the U. S. Death Star's desertion of the real, each of the collection's poems not merely "an escape / from reality, but a portal back into it."
May 21, 2022
To be human is to be afflicted with the “long sickness of existence.” At least, that’s the “chemical distress” apparent in Timothy Donnelly’s 2019 poetry collection, The Problem of the Many. And to be afflicted with the “long sickness of existence” is to not have a singular disease, but a communal one, and not a communal one merely of the present, but of epochs that came before you, of the animals and plants long since extinct, and to take for granted the gift of hours of toil, mastery, and artwork the worker bee used its lifetime to produce “one-twelfth a teaspoon of honey,” stirred away “thoughtlessly.”
And worse yet, to be existentially human in the face of an abundance that would astound our forbearers, making us feel guilty, quite frankly. At least, that’s how I took the final poem that follows the acknowledgements, “The Human,” where Donnelly states, “And when I close my eyes to brace against / the late imperial effects of it, I feel a forebear step forward / from a cave in thought, its arms extended as if to take part / bodily in the beauty of what we call sky, and through some new / distortion in the throat, indicates what the many, still situated / in the dark behind us, come one by one to tremble at the mouth to see.”
Of course, I find a deep abiding sense of beauty, rather than guilt, in the long arc from the cave to the “tremble at the mouth to see.” But I can understand folding that into a larger philosopher question of existential dread of what it means to be human, our infinitely constituted parts compared to the whole, as Donnelly explains it. Whether it is the infinitesimal at the level of the atom (he waxes philosophically about the cloud, how it “can’t behold the infinite inside itself; it will only see one cloud”), or the smallness felt by the vastness of the universe we inhabit, exemplified by Betelgeuse compared to Earth (Betelgeuse is 1,400 times larger than the sun), Donnelly tries to grapple through poetry the existential dread of the human.
That, for example, there is something deeply dark and dreadful in Donnelly’s telling about the emergence of vanilla, from a discovery made by a horticulturalist slave nobody in the modern world has heard of to its ubiquitous utilization in the poem, “Hymn to Edmond Albius.”
In other words, for Donnelly, there is something disquieting about knowing the darkness of our forbearers is behind us. He even blatantly suggests his fear of the dark in one of the poems, and now, I take that to mean something else entirely.
The engine of this existential dread, I think, is what scares Donnelly the most, and he quotes Emily Brontë to get at it, “Nature is an inexplicable problem. It exists on a principle of destruction.” Donnelly can’t quite abide by that destruction. It’s painful! Almost a sensory overload. And yet, we continue going on. Or the Earth continues spinning, as he says at one point.
I’m not adept enough at poetry to review this collection from the standpoint of its poetic form, but from the standpoint of its heavy dosage of philosophy (I particularly thought it fun to include reflections on Diogenes and a poem (“Malamute”) from the perspective of being a dog, since Diogenes is often associated with living a dog-like life) and conflicted introspection, I enjoyed the collection, and I know for certain, that something as dense as this poetry collection is (at nearly 200 pages, with lengthy poems, and poems steeped in philosophy), I would have to read it a second or third time to truly appreciate it.
“To be human is to be born blind to more than we can see, but almost made of it,” Donnelly says in, “The Problem of the Many,” the namesake of the book, and such is either the source of enormous, nearly unfathomable existential dread, as Donnelly beautifully paints in his collection, or for me, perhaps more a source of exquisite beauty, for I find beauty in the humility of not knowing.
And also, you know, that’s why I like poetry and poets. They help us see a little bit better.
And worse yet, to be existentially human in the face of an abundance that would astound our forbearers, making us feel guilty, quite frankly. At least, that’s how I took the final poem that follows the acknowledgements, “The Human,” where Donnelly states, “And when I close my eyes to brace against / the late imperial effects of it, I feel a forebear step forward / from a cave in thought, its arms extended as if to take part / bodily in the beauty of what we call sky, and through some new / distortion in the throat, indicates what the many, still situated / in the dark behind us, come one by one to tremble at the mouth to see.”
Of course, I find a deep abiding sense of beauty, rather than guilt, in the long arc from the cave to the “tremble at the mouth to see.” But I can understand folding that into a larger philosopher question of existential dread of what it means to be human, our infinitely constituted parts compared to the whole, as Donnelly explains it. Whether it is the infinitesimal at the level of the atom (he waxes philosophically about the cloud, how it “can’t behold the infinite inside itself; it will only see one cloud”), or the smallness felt by the vastness of the universe we inhabit, exemplified by Betelgeuse compared to Earth (Betelgeuse is 1,400 times larger than the sun), Donnelly tries to grapple through poetry the existential dread of the human.
That, for example, there is something deeply dark and dreadful in Donnelly’s telling about the emergence of vanilla, from a discovery made by a horticulturalist slave nobody in the modern world has heard of to its ubiquitous utilization in the poem, “Hymn to Edmond Albius.”
In other words, for Donnelly, there is something disquieting about knowing the darkness of our forbearers is behind us. He even blatantly suggests his fear of the dark in one of the poems, and now, I take that to mean something else entirely.
The engine of this existential dread, I think, is what scares Donnelly the most, and he quotes Emily Brontë to get at it, “Nature is an inexplicable problem. It exists on a principle of destruction.” Donnelly can’t quite abide by that destruction. It’s painful! Almost a sensory overload. And yet, we continue going on. Or the Earth continues spinning, as he says at one point.
I’m not adept enough at poetry to review this collection from the standpoint of its poetic form, but from the standpoint of its heavy dosage of philosophy (I particularly thought it fun to include reflections on Diogenes and a poem (“Malamute”) from the perspective of being a dog, since Diogenes is often associated with living a dog-like life) and conflicted introspection, I enjoyed the collection, and I know for certain, that something as dense as this poetry collection is (at nearly 200 pages, with lengthy poems, and poems steeped in philosophy), I would have to read it a second or third time to truly appreciate it.
“To be human is to be born blind to more than we can see, but almost made of it,” Donnelly says in, “The Problem of the Many,” the namesake of the book, and such is either the source of enormous, nearly unfathomable existential dread, as Donnelly beautifully paints in his collection, or for me, perhaps more a source of exquisite beauty, for I find beauty in the humility of not knowing.
And also, you know, that’s why I like poetry and poets. They help us see a little bit better.
July 15, 2022
A modern masterpiece
November 16, 2021
Very dense, with elaborate conceits, occasionally reaching the very borders of sense. Often meditative as well as trenchant.
A theme of the dialectic between nature and artifice is often explored (see "Diet Mountain Dew"). Nature is depicted as a product of chemical agents, which also turn against nature in a cycle of creative destruction/creation (to my modest understanding that's the gist of much of it).
It's likely I'll re-read the title piece, a rather lengthy rumination.
The prosody often consists of long lines, with a syntax like a coiled up spring, sending you into the line that follows. Often the conceits are dazzling (to use an oft-used expression).
I would rate the last poem, "Hymn to Life," as a bit long. The accumulation of facts and catalogues (of both the extinction of numerous species and references to the top forty) has the feel of someone obsessively Googling content. Then again, upon a second reading or perhaps a third, I could change my mind.
A theme of the dialectic between nature and artifice is often explored (see "Diet Mountain Dew"). Nature is depicted as a product of chemical agents, which also turn against nature in a cycle of creative destruction/creation (to my modest understanding that's the gist of much of it).
It's likely I'll re-read the title piece, a rather lengthy rumination.
The prosody often consists of long lines, with a syntax like a coiled up spring, sending you into the line that follows. Often the conceits are dazzling (to use an oft-used expression).
I would rate the last poem, "Hymn to Life," as a bit long. The accumulation of facts and catalogues (of both the extinction of numerous species and references to the top forty) has the feel of someone obsessively Googling content. Then again, upon a second reading or perhaps a third, I could change my mind.
February 20, 2022
Of color, the fascinating socio-historic origins of greens and blues; Of love of Earth and an expansive understanding of "the problem of [this] many" humans on the planet...; Of interrelatedness between human, insect, and amphibian worlds; of despair for the loss of species--an intelligent, eco-sensitive collection of poetry.
May 6, 2021
Took me almost a month to get through. Never a good sign
April 2, 2025
Not a huge fan of the style
April 27, 2020
And when the future arrives in its vehicles
to poke through the mineralized
forms we leave behind, will we all be one to its eye,
or will it make a difference who
among us tried to stop ourselves, or tried to stop those
in charge, or whether any of us put their young
to sleep at the end, and if with poison, or with song?
from "Poem Written with an Arrowhead in My Mouth"
to poke through the mineralized
forms we leave behind, will we all be one to its eye,
or will it make a difference who
among us tried to stop ourselves, or tried to stop those
in charge, or whether any of us put their young
to sleep at the end, and if with poison, or with song?
from "Poem Written with an Arrowhead in My Mouth"
October 27, 2019
Timothy Donnelly is the voice that just might draw you back toward wholeness. A true, living companion of a book. Completely extraordinary.
Displaying 1 - 9 of 9 reviews