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    Guesswork
    Guesswork
    Guesswork
    Ebook77 pages36 minutes

    Guesswork

    By Jeffery Donaldson

    4.5/5

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    About this ebook

    Winner, City of Hamilton Arts Award, Established Artist, Writing

    Beginning with an autobiographical account of the mind, Jeffery Donaldson’s marvellous new collection moves from personal history to national history, concluding with “Province House,” where the ghost of Sir John A. Macdonald has the last word on metaphor.

    In his fourth collection, Donaldson moves deftly between the incisive short lyric and the extended meditation, oscillating between detachment and engagement. In “Torso,” Donaldson considers the headless sculpture of Apollo, both chiselled rock and the changeling child of multiple observers. In a series of poems written from the vantage point of a hockey puck, the elements of a hockey game — the face-off, defensemen, play-by-play, referee, linesmen, clock, and net minder — twist in the fascinating funhouse mirror in the depths of Donaldson’s personal Platonic cave.

    Donaldson’s poems reveal a mind at once conversant with the literary deities and the subtleties of the everyday. Profoundly graceful in its recognition of the poetic heritage of others, Guesswork confirms that Donaldson is a poet whose craftsmanship, whose supple syntax and unerring sense of rhythm, are anything but guesswork.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherGoose Lane Editions
    Release dateJul 29, 2014
    ISBN9780864928207
    Guesswork
    Author

    Jeffery Donaldson

    Jeffery Donaldson is the author of several collections of poetry including Granted: Poems of Metaphor (Fall 2022). Palilalia was nominated for the Canadian Author’s Association Award for Poetry in 2008 and a prose work, Viaticum: From Notebooks, received the Hamilton Arts Council Award for non-fiction in 2021. Donaldson teaches poetry and poetics at McMaster University. He lives in Hamilton.

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