Openbound : Poems of Relation

The trouble with honesty, it has no / final answers, leaves you in the cranny / where nothing left unknown meets finding out.
The puzzles of poetry and marriage are these: How to hold on to what you also release? How to protect love when other loves are put between? In this collection of sixty-nine “fifteeners” – sonnet-like constellations of five tercets – Jeffery Donaldson explores the outcomes of both questions over the course of a life in verse and a loving thirty-one-year open marriage.

The poems orbit around two readings that Donaldson and his wife chose for their wedding: a passage from Rainer Maria Rilke about two people protecting one another’s solitude; and a scene from Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s The Little Prince in which the prince is told, “You are responsible for your rose.”

As openbound turns toward open marriage itself – its risks, its revelations, its misunderstandings, its wounds under cultural scrutiny – the work reveals itself foremost as a book of love poems, continuing Donaldson’s long devotion to a metaphoric both/and poetics capacious enough to hold loving and freedom in the same breath.