What does it mean to think, to imagine, to create, to be? Why do we believe what we do? Is death an ontological state of being, or is it a grammar error? What exactly is poetry? The varied writings in Jeffery Donaldson’s Viaticum explore life’s most basic questions—and its biggest illusions—from the nature of language to the rhetorical potential of the afterlife.
‘When does a thought become part of a poem and when does it become part of some other form of writing? ... You jot something down and watch to see how it leans.’
In Viaticum, Jeffery Donaldson presents selections from his notebooks that represent, as Wallace Stevens might say, ‘a readiness for first bells’. These proto-arguments and poetic seedlings—musings on the process of thought, the power of language, the passage of time and the promise of the afterlife—wait to see if ‘not yet’ might be ‘already something’. They offer glimpses inside the mind of a thoughtful poet, and provide readers with a spiritual conductor whose orchestral rehearsal culminates in no actual performance—‘only the sense that we are ready now’.