Palilalia.

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

Palilalia? The title is off-putting, and the back cover blurb announcing that Donaldson “offers poems about Tourette’s Syndrome” hardly invites an enthusiastic response. Yet readers like myself who had been impressed by his earlier volumes of verse, Once Out of Nature (1991) and Waterglass (1999), should be aware of the intellectual rewards he provides, and persevere. I did, and have been amply rewarded.

Palilalia is defined as a verbal tic that results in “an involuntary repetition of words, phrases, and sentences”; Tourette’s syndrome is characterized by “multiple tics, both motor and vocal,” and we learn that the poet himself suffers from the affliction. Still, I dislike being urged to read literature for non-poetic reasons; therapeutic verse has its limitations. But wait. Palilalia may be “disordered speech” (the blurb again), but is not that a possible definition of poetry itself? If Donaldson is admitting to a sickness, may it not be what past ages considered a “sacred” sickness? In any event, what he achieves here—with a combination of doggedness, boldness, and sheer savvy—results in the transformation of a potential liability into a creative opportunity.

Not surprisingly, Palilalia is Donaldson’s most personal book to date, with numerous moving poems scattered throughout the text. One is the opening poem, “Ultra Sound,” involving the narrating husband, his pregnant wife, their unborn child whose image is discernible on the screen, and an efficient technician who “measures out a line / and takes a pulse, notes any obvious stress, / counts the number of feet.” Wittily, modern technology and poetic analysis (“line,” “stress,” “feet”) combine remarkably.

But the triumph of the book is “Museum,” in which the poet meets the ghost of Northrop Frye in Toronto’s Museum subway station, near Victoria College, where Frye once taught Donaldson. Crushingly uninviting? In fact, it is a brilliant modern myth developing out of Dante’s Inferno and the famous air raid sequence in Eliot’s “Little Gidding.” Only a mature and sophisticated poet could risk the comparison. Donaldson succeeds, and produces what I consider a masterpiece. He is now an undisputed voice in contemporary poetry.