Jeffery Donaldson – författare

The trouble with honesty, it has no / final answers, leaves you in the cranny / where nothing left unknown meets finding out.The puzzles of poetry and marriage are these: How to hold on to what you also release? How to protect love when other loves are put between? In this collection of sixty-nine “fifteeners” – sonnet-like constellations of five tercets – Jeffery Donaldson explores the outcomes of both questions over the course of a life in verse and a loving thirty-one-year open marriage.The poems orbit around two readings that Donaldson and his wife chose for their wedding: a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke about two people protecting one another’s solitude; and a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in which the prince is told, “You are responsible for your rose.”As openbound turns toward open marriage itself – its risks, its revelations, its misunderstandings, its wounds under cultural scrutiny – the work reveals itself foremost as a book of love poems, continuing Donaldson’s long devotion to a metaphoric both/and poetics capacious enough to hold loving and freedom in the same breath.

Winner, City of Hamilton Arts Award, Established Artist, WritingBeginning with an autobiographical account of the mind, Jeffery Donaldson's marvellous new collection moves from personal history to national history, concluding with "Province House," where the ghost of Sir John A. Macdonald has the last word on metaphor.In his fourth collection, Donaldson moves deftly between the incisive short lyric and the extended meditation, oscillating between detachment and engagement. In "Torso," Donaldson considers the headless sculpture of Apollo, both chiselled rock and the changeling child of multiple observers. In a series of poems written from the vantage point of a hockey puck, the elements of a hockey game — the face-off, defensemen, play-by-play, referee, linesmen, clock, and net minder — twist in the fascinating funhouse mirror in the depths of Donaldson's personal Platonic cave.Donaldson's poems reveal a mind at once conversant with the literary deities and the subtleties of the everyday. Profoundly graceful in its recognition of the poetic heritage of others, Guesswork confirms that Donaldson is a poet whose craftsmanship, whose supple syntax and unerring sense of rhythm, are anything but guesswork.