Jeffery Donaldson is exactly how I picture a poet should be. Not one of those tortured, angsty types, unchecked in their spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion and morbidity (you can find some of them skulking about on tumblr), but one who balances piercing intelligence, extensive cultural knowledge, lyricism and emotional depth into his work expertly. If you have an excess of any one of these elements, the poetry can become cold and inaccessible or can overwhelm the reader with unchecked affect or even become plain boring. However, Donaldson performs the balancing act well. In other words, he makes me think thoughts and feel feelings. One of my favourite of his poems is from his latest poetry collection, Slack Action (The Porcupine’s Quill, 2013) about a dollhouse:
Salvage 