Palilalia
By: Jeffery Donaldson.
Series: The Hugh MacLennan poetry series
Publisher: McGill-Queen's University Press
Published: 2008
Place of publication: Montréal
Language: eng
Number of pages: 81
ISBN-13: 9780773533837
Description: Palilalia is disordered speech. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, this lesser known vocal tic is “an involuntary repetition of words, phrases or sentences.” Sister to echolalia (repeating what others say), and distant cousin to the more forbidding coprolalia (the involuntary use of obscene language), palilalia can feel, on the one hand, like an affliction to be suppressed, and on the other, like a kind of meditative mantra that focuses and intensifies your thought.

"Your repetitious tics," the ghost of the poet's mentor, Northrop Frye, tells him, are “ the ecstatic rhapsodist’s / St. Vitus Dance, slangster’s whizzle / and conjuration, philologist’s hullabaloo.” It isn’t a question of how to stop them, but of finding how far they will take you.

Jeffery Donaldson offers poems about Tourette's Syndrome, about his loves and blessings, about the erotic life as flavoured by all these, and about the grace of a stillness in the midst of so much mental noise. Paul Valéry said that a poem is never finished, only abandoned. All poets have palilalia, or should have....
Notes: Poems.
Table of contents: title: Palilalia Jeffery Donaldson  Table of Contents   ONE Ultra Sound 3 Blocks 6 First Dream 9 Gloucester’s Dover 10 Palilalia 16 Museum 18 The Shambles: A House 27 Garden Variation 30 Vanishing Point 33 Spoken For 34  TWO While We Grow Tired, Like Swimmers 37 Life-guard and Four Echoes 38 Home Body 39 Riddle 40 Lesson by Candle-light 41  THREE EROGENOUS ZONES Catch 45 Cashew 46 Cave 47 Rescue 49 Dock 50 Seed 51 After Eggplant Shopping 52 Ode on a Henry Moore 54 Sewer 56  FOUR Still Life with Jar and Flower 61 A Gloss on “Crossing Brooklyn Ferry” 62 Before and After 64 Timed Exposure 65 Hereafter I 67 Hereafter II 68 Where We Are Now 70 Let 73 Enter, Puck 75  Acknowledgments 81