Waterglass

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.

With the publication of Once Out of Nature in 1991, Jeffery Donaldson
was welcomed by thoughtful and fastidious poetry readers as a remarkably
assured and sophisticated newcomer to the Canadian literary scene. Many
of us have been waiting for a second volume with keen anticipation, and
Waterglass, if it doesn’t noticeably extend his range, can certainly
be treasured as offering more of the accomplished and satisfying verse
he had already provided.

Donaldson’s verse is challenging without being obscurantist, sinewy
without being dry, learned without being overacademic. Many of his best
poems, in both volumes, explore the personal lives of artists and
intellectuals. Thus in Once Out of Nature we find poems about Monet,
Heidegger, Mandelstam, Vitruvius, and Mahler, while in Waterglass we
encounter verse vignettes dealing with Bonnard’s wife, the
Secessionist exhibition in Vienna in 1905, a painting by Caspar David
Friedrich, and Freud’s last days in England.

He is especially fond of three-line stanzas resembling Dante’s terza
rima, though these are generally unrhymed. Most are faithful to an
iambic-pentameter norm, but are prodigal with subtly nuanced variation.
Eschewing the “poetic” on the one hand and “free verse” on the
other, Donaldson lays emphasis on verbal and tonal control. His poems
are often moving, but the emotion arises out of the subject matter and
is never foisted on it by the writer.

This is not verse that is likely to create an immediate impact. It
makes no concessions to popular taste, and is hardly ever recognizably
“Canadian.” Donaldson writes, one might say, for the cognoscenti,
and while this sophistication may confine him to a small readership
within the already small readership of poetry lovers, his work is built
to last. I wish, however, that he had included a few basic notes—as he
did in his first book—to assist those for whom the details of his
subjects are further from the front of the mind than they are for him.
Nevertheless, these poems open their riches to the persevering.

The whole book has been elegantly produced by the publishers.