Peter J. Donnelly’s Solving the Puzzle (Alien Buddha Press) doesn’t try to dazzle you with syntactic fireworks or metaphysical gamesmanship. Instead, it walks straight into the room and tells you something honest. This is a book preoccupied with death, memory, grief, and the liminal moments we all quietly endure. It’s about holding things together when they’re already in pieces. And although its language is gentle, it’s never toothless.
At its best, Donnelly’s poetry is intimate and precise, capturing what it feels like to be alive (and losing bits of yourself) in real time. If there’s a puzzle here, it’s not the poems. They’re crystal clear. The puzzle is living.
Thematically, the collection circles around absence and return, the friction between past and present, and the residue of lives half-known or half-remembered. In Felin Rhiwbren, the speaker recalls a poet-friend through fragments of geography and gatherings, “the Castle Hotel, / its walls red and white like the cover of your book”, setting a tone of quiet pilgrimage. There’s an emotional sleight of hand here: the intimacy of the line “Like the poems I wish I’d written sooner, / I wish now I had written you a letter” sneaks up on you, revealing Donnelly’s talent for making regret feel not just personal but archival. These are poems that preserve rather than perform, curating traces with forensic tenderness.
His formal choices, free verse, consistent use of plain diction, near-total avoidance of flourish, serve the memory-laden tone. But Donnelly isn’t just chronicling; he’s interrogating. In Your Second Book, he muses, “Why couldn’t it have been your third?”—a small question that opens into a larger meditation on literary continuity and the commodification of legacy. That this reflection arises upon finding a second-hand copy in Oxfam underscores the quiet cruelty of literary disposability. The poem edges into metafiction, challenging not just how we remember writers, but how we inherit them, and what happens when their work turns into mere inventory.
Elsewhere, Donnelly tightens the lens. A List of Your Dislikes functions like a poetic character sketch composed of negations, yet it manages to construct a whole world of taste, politics, and resistance. “You never used semi-colons, / a word you detested was pink.” These lines are deceptively casual, but in context they become acts of intimate excavation. The refusal of pink isn’t just aesthetic, it hints at deeper aversions, unstated traumas, or quiet rebellions. The rejection of adverbs, the avoidance of Disney, each is a clue in the mosaic. The final wish, “I hope that wouldn’t change / should you hear or read this,” lands as a subtle punch, self-aware, vulnerable, and temporally unmoored.
Stylistically, Donnelly stays loyal to a minimalist lyricism that privileges tone over technique. Yet in The Late Owner of Aardvark’s, the sparse narrative blossoms into something more layered. The poem’s soft-spoken mourning, “I wish I could say that although / it’s been seventeen years / I could recall a line / from one of his poems”, quietly damns the romantic myth of poetic immortality. The inability to remember becomes the point. It’s a poetry of gaps, silences, and awkward truths, with the grace not to pretend otherwise.
In the wider landscape of contemporary poetry, Solving the Puzzle sits apart from the overwrought trauma-poem factories and the winking irony of the Instagram crowd. This is a book grounded in the tangible—people, places, physical objects, cultural debris. Donnelly is closer in spirit to poets like Helen Mort or Michael Laskey, though without their overt lyricism. It’s a collection for wide readers of contemporary poetry who prefer detail over dazzle, humility over high drama.
Solving the Puzzle isn’t trying to change the game, but that’s its rebellion. In an era drunk on voice and spectacle, Donnelly opts for intimacy, context, and patience. There’s no performance here, just a long conversation with the dead, the distant, and the almost-forgotten. And in that, he’s given us something more lasting than trend: a kind of durable, everyday transcendence.
About the Author
Peter J Donnelly lives in York where he works as a hospital secretary. He has been published in various magazines and anthologies and is the author of a chapbook ‘The Second of August’ published by AlienBuddha Press.
