New Releases by Don Domanski

A celebration of the work of one of Canada's finest poets, Don Domanski, the Selected Poems distils his forty-five-year career into 108 poems gathered from the nine collections published during his lifetime.

Governor General's Award-winning poet Don Domanski's posthumous last collection once again melds perception-expanding environmental poetry and metaphysics into a seamless, moving lyric whole. Fetishes of the Floating World continues Don's lifelong exploration of mystical ecology. It is an invitation to experience the sacred dimensions of what-is and to become more intimate with the strangeness that haunts our lively, changeable world. Here is a spirituality that doesn't turn its back on the material; instead it offers us "prehensile psalms," immerses us in earthly being. Domanski invites us to live with the mystery that inheres in the unparsable entanglements of place, drawing attention now to "a flash mob of ants," now to "lighting strikes and plankton," now to the "creaking hinge on each blade of grass." The sustained apprehension of deep time underlies every moment of this work; every moment is held up against that more-than-human span and is relinquished to it. Domanski's full-bodied, incantatory language will penetrate your very marrow, calling you out of yourself to testify to the world's "inclement graces." As Mark Strand wrote of his previous work, "...Domanski's poems are intimate, but intimate on a grand scale. As far as I am concerned, there is no better poet writing in English." This remains eminently true here, in his last collection.

From a master poet, meditative lines running like veins through the dark grace of being alive. Governor General's Award-winning poet Don Domanski's new collection, Bite Down Little Whisper, delves into the interconnectedness of all life with spiritual gravitas and powerful mindfulness. These are poems brimming with mythological and scientific energies, with a multi-dimensionality that opens itself to both complexity and clarity. Domanski shows us seams and fastenings that unite our longings with the earth itself, with the nonhuman vitality that surrounds us. The heart's need for unity and reverence is present in these poems as a whisper we hear in occasional moments of quietude, when it's possible to perceive the workings of a larger existence. Quietude is called returning to life Lao Tze says even on a Tuesday afternoon in Nova Scotia even with the hood ornaments of chocolate irises gleaming outward from their arterial darkness with the unborn standing high up in the trees like cemetery angels one finger pointing to heaven the other to earth - from Ars Magica

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.

A poet of osmosis explores the implicit relationship between matter and spirit, the interconnectedness of the universe. In his first full-length collection since 1998's Parish of the Physic Moon, Don Domanski writes with clarity of vision. He is a poet of the holiness of subtleties, a master of mindfulness and being. His writing is a form of osmosis, spirit seeping through the details of each poem, creating a marvel of metaphysics and language distilled to purest energy. Living in the moment here is synonymous with being the moment, a transformation that is stunning to inhabit. The Star Bellatrix the bride turns in a trance red flowers fall out of her hands endlessly into black space her desire is a hesitance her body warm as if she were dancing spinning on a floor her partner unbeheld. Intensely moving, these fluid poems open up our perceptions of what it means to be alive in a sentient universe. "Poetry renews itself with each generation, but there is a source of poetry older than all the languages. Don Domanski writes close to this source, where autobiography is necessarily transpersonal, and the variegated finery of existent things is both secular home and sacred text. Each of his books, but especially this book, is a mirror for the inexhaustible." -- Roo Borson "Each poem, beautiful, bewitching, unfolds with crystalline clarity and with a music that is both lush and subtle. Don Domanski's poems are intimate, but intimate on a grand scale. As far as I am concerned, there is no better poet writing in English." -- Mark Strand Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has published eight books of poetry. Two of his books (Wolf Ladder, 1991, and Stations of the Left Hand, 1994) were short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. In 1999 he won the Canadian Literary Award for Poetry. Published and reviewed internationally, his work has been translated into Czechoslovakian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Don Domanski is one of Canada’s most original and accomplished poetic voices. In this outstanding new collection, he ushers us into a strange and beautiful landscape, illuminated by medicinal moonlight, beset by uneasy dreams. At the core of these poems is a physical sense of the spiritual world and the restorative powers of mystery. The animals in Domanski’s poetic bestiary can show us nature red in tooth and claw, but also nature as a healing force. The houses, elevators, and shadows of our daily lives become cosmologies of fear and love. A train trip to Fredericton opens onto eternity. The twelve months of the year offer up unique revelations of the continual movement between matter and spirit. Don Domanski is well-known as a seer of the unexpected, for finely tuned metaphors which give a distinct and sometimes hair-raising spin on the real world we allegedly live in. This is a major book by a Canadian poet at the peak of his craft.

"In poems that transgress the boundary between the conscious and the unconscious, Don Domanski has created a marvellous brew of myth, natural science, the occult, astronomy and the daily world of flesh and blood." - Back cover.