Slack Action'Slack action' describes the movement of boxcars in the midst of a train
that brakes and then accelerates, where 'reciprocal momentums ... meet
and intermingle, the forward push / backing into slows, and the slows
pulling off / pulling forward ahead of their kickbacks and jostles ...' –
where certain 'single cars hidden / in the midst, scudding alone,
neither pushed / nor pulled, left gentled into hiatus,' coast free. This
is the space of Jeffery Donaldson's fifth collection: poems of middle
life, of Dante's forest of half-way, their speakers gliding with pent
momentum between children who are on their way in and parents who are on
their way out. Yet these are also poems that suggest all life is middle
life: we live in a present moment that coasts between a beginning we
can't remember and an end we can't predict. Few things are more
difficult to represent in lyric poems, with their calculated incipits
and finales; Donaldson has evolved a poetics of the middle, in which
single words and images, whole poems, even, coast free 'an instant in
the long line's accordion folds' / uneasy breathing.' |
Contents
Slack Action 11 Lift | 11 |
Slack Action | 13 |
Assisted Care | 16 |
Inspirit | 19 |
Hand | 22 |
The Contents | 24 |
Eocene Plant Fossil 27 With a Line from a Dream | 27 |
Four Haiku | 30 |
A Touretters TwelveTone Sonnet | 38 |
Toy Poems | 41 |
JackintheBox | 43 |
Spinning Top 44 Yoyo | 44 |
Rocking Horse | 46 |
Figurine | 48 |
Marbles | 50 |
Kite | 52 |
Troy | 31 |
The Stadium 32 More than Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Listener | 32 |
The Selected Poems | 37 |
Ball | 53 |