Fluke Print - Softcover

Donaldson, Jeffery

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0889844119 ISBN 13: 9780889844117

Publisher: Porcupine's Quill, 2018

Synopsis

Jeffery Donaldson's Fluke Print is a collection of imprints, opposites and offsets-poetry that reflects on and reimagines creativity, emotion and intellect. For, as Donaldson writes, `Both ends of this dull pencil have their say / and go together.'

About this title

About the Author:

Jeffery Donaldson is the author of five previous collections of poetry, most recently Slack Action (Porcupine's Quill, 2011), which was shortlisted for the Hamilton Arts Council Literary Award for Poetry. Palilalia (McGill-Queen's, 2008) was a finalist for the Canadian Author's Association Award for Poetry. Donaldson has also written works of criticism on poetry and metaphor. He lives in Hamilton, Ontario, where he teaches poetry and American literature at McMaster University.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Contrapuntal

Both ends of this dull pencil have their say
and go together. For when I try

the tapered point, finding I am led
to write before I die its darker things, instead

catch my eye ascending to the nub?
(the nodding jester's blunt "ah there's the rub!")

that daubs above the dismal lines below
a flourishing "I would not have it so."

Dyslexic, mute, it holds - that subtle curse -
a mirror up to nothing, in reverse.

My aching slant, my least that can be said,
is followed backwards by a nulling thread,

whose wavings-off, dismissive counter-sign,
become facetious, affable, benign,

a clear, upending scrub, as though?the baser
word that everything must go

were giddily extinguished in the air.
What all I cannot say is written there.

Copula

Among our parsing, several moods
of selfhood, conjugated thus-
I am, you are, she is, word-chess
where grapple our twinned solitudes,

where all our spoked divergent lines
of empathy come to quarrel-
we seek a marriage of true Mines
in the first-person plural.

First person? Plural? We won't add up.
The pronoun buckles under weight.
Our one-for-two's an iffy trope,
dichotomous and incomplete

unless made whole by that pure is,
the metaphoric predicate,
whose blithe between-where synapses
can couple kinds, make this a that.

Sooner said than done. Lying alike
conjoined, subjects that in part agree,
we give it the old college try,
our both I's open, cheek to cheek,

and listen, knowing how, just when
you touch your inner, stranger half,
my me divides you from yourself,
but seeks you there, again, again.

How else to conjugate, or dance
our pas de deux of Her and His,
to merge and part, on the off chance
(however wrong) we is, we is.

About this edition

• Publisher: Porcupine's Quill
• Publication date: 2018
• ISBN 10: 0889844119
• ISBN 13: 9780889844117
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 80