Granted
Poems of Metaphor
- Publisher
- Porcupine's Quill
- Initial publish date
- Jan 2023
- Category
- Canadian, General
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9780889844544
- Publish Date
- Jan 2023
- List Price
- $16.95
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Description
Metaphor is the substance of things hoped for and the proof of things not seen. It is a building block, not a tower or its view. It is a gift impossible to guess, and not to be opened until you do. Metaphor is coinage dropped so that others might decipher us.
The poems in Jeffery Donaldson's Granted serve as a sort of Metaphor 101, an education in the making of metaphor, its motives and its meaning. But more than that, these poems represent a study of beingâand of becoming. They make relations, correspondences, attachments, and in so doing, they investigate the gaps between identity and imagination, truth and perception, love and faith. As Donaldson reminds us, when it comes to metaphor, distance makes no difference: it 'breathes / in impossible spots, pairs that can't be, / and finds in them untold possibilities.'
About the author
Jeffery Donaldson is the author of Palilalia, a finalist for the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry, Waterglass, and Once out of Nature. He has also the co-editor of Frye and the Word: Religious Contexts in the Writings of Northrop Frye. Donaldson teaches poetry and American literature at McMaster University. He lives on the Niagara Escarpment near Grimsby, Ontario.
Excerpt: Granted: Poems of Metaphor (by (author) Jeffery Donaldson)
XI
After my mother and my father died,
I went the longest time not seeing them.
It was strange at first. Their not being here
was quite unlike anything I had known
up to the time. And not knowing, it felt
as though an old familiar table,
which perhaps I had taken for granted
most days when I would often place my keys
on it when I got home, had disappeared,
and without the table I'd stand with the keys,
not wanting to put them down somewhere else
where they wouldn't belong, and I might
lose them, and I would be lost where to turn,
until one day, coming home, I saw them,
right there, not as the table but the keys.
LI
Folks are talking. What he said, what she said.
What she said he said, and the other way.
All the play has gone out of us, it seems.
Everyone is trying to get along,
mostly. I saw a couple in the park
sitting on an empty bench, hashing it out.
They'd been saying things back and forth.
He seemed the pushy one, she the sharer.
What held them apart was a difference
not solved between them, a side of each each
hoped to get across. We're unlike, he said.
To call a truce or to be adamant?
Then he reached out and took the woman's hand.
She didn't pull it back, but you could see,
for her part, it had stopped being her hand.
XCIII
I could never dream, o day of my birth,
how you put your hat beside your satchel
on the beach and made a sanctuary
along the shoreline, empty in every
direction. The gesture itself was not
so much accidental, as unforeseen
in its significance. I never found
a reason for it. The hat was a hat.
The satchel the same. But somehow the two
of them together on the shore, empty
in all directions, said more than either
alone could do, more than the vacant beach,
and certainly more than you yourself,
who waded from shore before I got here,
could have told me, had you ever returned.
