Pocketful of metaphors:
Poetry book invites comparison Jeffery Donaldson to read from ‘Granted,’ a new collection of poems, about metaphor, at Monday event
Metaphor. How to describe it. To borrow a cliché, it is what it is ... n’t, -ish.
We do not literally gather our thoughts, yet we do. Life is not a tale told by an idiot (a metaphor Shakespeare coined, presumably after hiring Caleb the hairy ostler to play Juliet because you couldn’t have a girl on stage) — and yet it is. And love is not a rose and yet, you know ... its colours can glow, then fade, it can prick you but who wants to be in a world without it/them — love, roses.
We know what the poets mean when they meet a metaphor, which is like a simile but, well, like, without the like. Metaphor is the hot reactor core in the power plant of language — sorry. Maybe not just of language but of thinking itself.
Jeffery Donaldson is a poet, so metaphor is near to his aorta but also he is a literary critic so he not only uses metaphor but thinks about it. A lot.
In 2015 he wrote a book called “Missing Link: The Evolution of Metaphor and the Metaphor of Evolution,” a book uniting literary theory with cognitive and evolutionary science.
“I thought I had finished it (the book was 400 plus pages),” says Donaldson, a well-known Hamilton poet and creative writing and literary criticism professor at McMaster University. “But I hadn’t.”
He felt a need to say more about metaphors but not in prose.
Hence, “Granted,” his new collection of poems, exactly 100 of them all on the theme of metaphor, in its largest sense.
The poems are all written in tercets (three lines per stanza), each poem five stanzas long. The book is rife with poetic observation, concrete imagery, abstract realities, insights about how we think, about how we think about how we think, about how we make thoughts out in language and how those thoughts in language shape the shape of real things and our perception of them, including people, patterns and emotions.
“It’s not really about metaphors (plural, as in examples of metaphors) but about metaphor, as a
process,” says Donaldson, of the book. It is a kind of daydreaming and a kind of “play.”
“Metaphoric thinking is something we all share,” he says. “We’re metaphoric thinkers. Neuron networks, leaping across gaps,” bridging, joining the one to the other. “It’s native to us.”
While “Granted” is rooted in such considerations, which can be or at least seem to be somewhat esoteric, it is very accessible. There are poems in this volume about the poet missing his dead parents and how he could not “see” them any more, for a long time, until he learned how to picture them again, comparing their absence to the disappearance of an old familiar table on which he would always put his keys, so he would always be able to find his keys.
Then, spoiler alert, he came home one day and saw his parents — not as the table but as the keys.
There are characters in the book and relational situations and much familiar territory and in dealing with that territory Donaldson, throughout, playfully employs some stock metaphors like mountains, forests and sailing on oceans.
He even, as a Hamiltonian, works in a civic metaphor, comparing the jolt of seeing fresh and rightly through a small choice of metaphor to the jolt of a hammer.
Donaldson will be reading from this lively, thoughtful, gracefully written book, published by The Porcupine’s Quill, at a special launch/reading/signing event on Monday, March 13 at Shawn & Ed Brewing Co., 65 Hatt St., in Dundas, 7 p.m.
Donaldson will be joined by poet Alexandra Oliver, of Burlington, who will also be reading, from her acclaimed new book “Hail, the Invisible Watchman.”
‘‘ We’re metaphoric thinkers. Neuron networks, leaping across gaps.
JEFFREY DONALDSON POET