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Poetry Canadian

Earthly Pages

The Poetry of Don Domanski

by (author) Don Domanski

edited by Brian Bartlett

Publisher
Wilfrid Laurier University Press
Initial publish date
Aug 2007
Category
Canadian, Canadian, Literary
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781554580088
    Publish Date
    Aug 2007
    List Price
    $21.99
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781554582075
    Publish Date
    Apr 2011
    List Price
    $11.99

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Description

With The Cape Breton Book of the Dead, Don Domanski emerged as a remarkable new voice in Canadian poetry, combining formal conciseness with broad cosmic allusions, constant surprise with brooding atmospherics, and innovative syntax with delicate phrasings. In subsequent collections, Domanski’s poetry has deepened and expanded, with longer lines and more complex structures that journey into the far reaches of metaphor. Now, with Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski, the long-awaited first selection from his books, readers have a chance to experience the full range of his work in one volume.

Editor Brian Bartlett, in his introduction, “The Trees are Full of Rings,”, discusses Domanski’s engagement with nature and the transformative power of his metaphors; his poetic bestiary amd mythical underpinnings; and his kinship to poets like Stevens, Whitman, and Rumi. Like these poets, Domanski is drawn to borderlands between the physical and the spiritual, the unconscious and the conscious. His poetry finds a home for demons and angels, spiders and wolves—and for kitchens and back alleys, forests and stars.

In language both fluent and hypnotic, Domanski maintains an awareness of both the magnitudes and the minutiae that live beyond language. In “Flying Over Language,” an essay written specifically for this volume, the poet explains that for him metaphor is one way to suggest the wealth of being that poetry can only point toward.

About the authors

Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and lived for many years in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of nine previous books of poetry. His 2007 collection All Our Wonder Unavenged was honoured with the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Award, and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. In 2014 he won the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award for Bite Down Little Whisper. Published and reviewed internationally, his work has been translated into Czech, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish. He died on September 7, 2020.

Don Domanski's profile page

As a high-school student, Brian Bartlett was invited to join the Ice House Gang, so-called because they met in the University of New Brunswick's historic Ice House every Tuesday night to read their poetry and hone their talents. Amazed and delighted by Bartlett's gift for words, Robert Gibbs, Bill Bauer, Kent Thompson, and Alden Nowlan inspired him to become the accomplished artist he is today. He published his chapbook Finches for the Wake when he was only 18 years old. The next year, Brother's Insomnia was published as a New Brunswick Chapbook. Since this apprenticeship period, Bartlett has published six highly acclaimed collections: Cattail Week, Planet Harbor, Underwater Carpentry, Granite Erratics, The Afterlife of Trees, and Wanting the Day. His poetry has won Two Malahat Review Long Poem prizes, a fellowship to the Hawthornden Castle International Writers' Retreat in Scotland, and first prize in the 2000 Petra Kenney poetry awards. A talented writer of prose, Bartlett's essays, stories, and reviews have appeared in Books in Canada, Canadian Literature, The Fiddlehead, and Brick, as well as Best Canadian Stories and The Journey Prize Anthology. A native of Fredericton, New Brunswick, Bartlett spent 15 years in Montreal, studying at McGill and teaching at Concordia. Today, he teaches creative writing and literature at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.

Brian Bartlett's profile page

Excerpt: Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski (by (author) Don Domanski; edited by Brian Bartlett)

Dangerous Words by Don Domanski

little by little the thistles suffer on the hill

bare trees enter the river

the wind takes the earth and blows

it drop by drop into your ear

you are ashes mixed with rain and sleep

leaves rustling in a closed hand

a mouse dropped out of a cloud

dangerous words pass under your window

words that no one has ever used before

you follow them into the woods

your find three words building a fire

one word skinning a rabbit

and another word far off in the shadows

pissing on a violet

what do they have for you

these five elves these little men

this little sentence in the forest?

they have but one knife between them

one hat one coin one pot

and a dark bag full of spoons

what good are they to you?

what can they give you

that you don't already have?

if you touch them

you touch a hanging bell

and a small tongue wakes in the grass

to speak to you to give you a name

to call you tulip or pincurl

or doll's breath

which means you'll never see

your home again not your parents

or their love

which means you will always whisper

but never speak

never escape these little men

these words burning their supper their rabbit-water

in an iron pot.

Editorial Reviews

''Disarmingly forthright, Domanski's exploration of intuition is inviting.''

Journal of Canadian Poetry

''Bartlett's selection of poems provides a most helpful introduciton to Domanski. Bartlett's opening essay explores sources and affinities ... without diminishing the poet's originality. Bartlett ... also looks at the range of his work, both the allusiveness and the reach into space (from critters of the forest floor to the stars) and time (back as far as the origins of life).... The volume concludes with a concise, powerful essay by the poet himself, an exploration of his ideas about intuition, about language ('language itself is transient, and the usage we lean so heavily upon is nailed to thin air').... The core of the book is poetry, thirty-six poems that illustrate Domanski's genius, his ability to nail meaning to thin air. The poems introduce us to a universe rich and strange and full of perilous seas, and the metaphors persuade us that it is our own.... Traces of the invisible are everywhere visible in this poet's work, and that is an earned paradox.''

Canadian Literature

''The quest for a wider audience for poetry may be quixotic, but this series makes a serious attempt to present attractive, affordable selections that speak to contemporary interests and topics that might engage a younger generation of readers. Yet it does not condescend, preferring to provide substantial and sophisticated poets to these new readers. At the very least, these slim volumes will make very useful introductory teaching texts in post-secondary classrooms because they whet the appetite without overwhelming.''

Canadian Literature, 193, Summer 2007

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