Waterglass

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta. He is
the author of Calling Texas, Earth Prime, and Mind the Gap.

Waterglass is full of well-written, even fussy poems. Donaldson uses the
dramatic monologue and the letter form to create narratives, which is
certainly one alternative to the subjective lyric. His desire to
recapture the powers of narrative is admirable, but there is too much
drawn-out circumstance in his longer poems (“The Gift of a Water
Clock,” “Annunciation,” “The Spoils of Patronage,” and “The
Last Analysis”), all of which could have been cut by half.
“Annunciation” puts so much weight on a symbolic object—a bathtub,
as a focus for examining a woman’s life—that it becomes an absurd
symbol. “Patronage” is an unconvincing letter sent by woman to her
father to explain why she is modeling for Gustav Klimt. In “Last
Analysis,” a monologue directed by a patient in Hampstead to the dying
Freud fails to capture the pathos of the situation, and the insights
dissolve into rhetorical questions at the end.

Donaldson is actually at his best in shorter pieces, like his
descriptive lyrics and family poems. To put it in his own terms, he is
not certain if a poem is merely a ceremony. His narratives seem to
suggest that he wants more, but his narratives remain
ceremonies—incantations that fail to raise the spirits of his human
subjects. His talent is apparent, but the work needs focus and a
less-elaborate mode of narration.