Description:
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.Brief description: Jeffery Donaldson teaches English at McMaster University and is the author of poetry collections Palilalia and Waterglass as well as Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution.
Review Quotes: "openbound is a mesmerising poem-cum-post mortem on an open marriage. Donaldson's dignified, lyrical lines harmonize without blunting the mixed feelings arising from a messy human drama. 'How generous we were, how civilized. And heartless, ' Donaldson writes, questioning events and motives with the curiosity of the philosopher and the historian's sense of inevitability. 'All the joys of regret are in the realm of possibility, ' Donaldson sighs, without knowing where that longed-for realm may lie, in a world in which what is precious and what is painful are so often the same thing." Daniel Cowper, author of Kingdom of the Clock