TIMOTHY DONNELLY'S SECOND BOOK of poetry arrives with considerable fanfare. The Cloud Corporation is a scary bedtime book, one that sometimes slips into a gothic mood, sometimes rehearses an idyll, and sometimes toys with the apocalypse. It's not above a little mischief and can become by turns grotesque, mawkish, "chill," deliberately inelegant, and really funny. A nasty compound of slapstick and terror grips the reader without apology in the few poems that are fully appropriated from external sources: one a pastiche of Bruce Springsteen lyrics and the USA Patriot Act, another a mash-up of the Beverly Hillbillies theme song and a manifesto of Osama bin Laden. But Donnelly's style does not generally yield the pace or the pitted surface of the mash-up; instead, it models itself serially after the meditative lyric of Wallace Stevens; the feigned awkwardness of Thomas Hardy; the metropolitan (but also provincial) decadence of Frederick Seidel; the speculative heights of Mallarmé or Percy Shelley; the abject humor of Samuel Beckett.

The Cloud Corporation has also stirred in some readers a complex of untraceable, or perhaps unnamable, feelings. To borrow the theorist Sianne Ngai's taxonomy, these might be described as "ugly feelings": discomfort, annoyance, contempt, but also envy and a kind of bashfulness. More disconcerting was the fact that the feelings experienced reading this book seem not to be one's own, feelings difficult to manage precisely because their origin and significance are obscure. Or perhaps that is the point, that none of our feelings are really our own? Here's a little taste of the pretty toxin (called "Clair de Lune"):

We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us.
The way we look at us lately chills us to the core.
We become like those who seek to destroy us.

We push ourselves into small tasks that employ us
unrewardingly on purpose. We tire, we bore.
We revolt ourselves; we disgust and annoy us.

The feelings aroused by such passages are partly a response to an ambient sense of imposture and rarefaction. These bad feelings-not jarring but creeping-emanate from a series of counterfeit locations, doctrines, and sensations, counterfeits that appear throughout the collection. Some of the corrosive feelings go away, replaced by more familiar pleasures, but their polarizing effects are nevertheless crucial, I believe, to the synthesizing powers of Donnelly's book and its ability to act upon the reader. 

Donnelly's poetry produces pleasure in knots, though its experimental designs are adept at undoing every kind of knot-including its own knots of pleasure-a polarizing movement experienced by the reader at times as a kind of verbal, or virtual, hazing, which nonetheless can bring to mind the term eloquence. The text's purgatorial maze of feeling, like its ethical concerns (reflections on death, for example, or on ecology), build their effects, one must emphasize, through a decisive experiment in prosody and poetic diction. Here, for example, one is stopped dead in one's tracks by a discursive mirror returning the reader's hesitant gaze:

It falls upon us then to build up our resistance to
   the lure of such reversal, letting what has seemed

plow ahead with its seeming without interruption,
   lest we find ourselves sent on the infinitel...