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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.
Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax. He has published eight books of poetry, two of which were short-listed for the Governor General’s Award, and in 1999 he won the Canadian Literary Award for Poetry. Published and reviewed internationally, his work has been translated into Czech, Portuguese, and Spanish.
|Brian Bartlett’s books of poetry include Granite Erratics, The Afterlife of Trees, Travels of the Watch, and Wanting the Day: Selected Poems, which was published in both Britain and Canada and won the 2004 Atlantic Poetry Prize. He also edited Don McKay: Essays on His Works and is working on a collection of prose, Living with Poetry. He teaches at Saint Mary’s University in Halifax.
Table of Contents for Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski, selected with an introduction by Brian Bartlett
Foreward | Neil Besner
Biographical Note
Introduction: The Trees Are Full of Rings | Brian Barlett
Beldam
Angels
Summer-Piece
The Sacrifice
Sunrise at Sea Level
One for an Apparition
A Netherpoem
Sub Rosa
Snowbound Letter
Visiting the Grandmother
At Daybreak a Hairsbreadth Turns to Blue
Hammerstroke
Hammerstroke II
Dangerous Words
Looking for a Destination
The Sleepers
Love Poem on the Sabbath
A Perfect Forehead
The Ape of God
The God of Folding
Excathedra
Fata Morgana
Epiphany Under Thunderclouds
Before the Plague and the Breaking of Fingers
Lethean Lock Mnemonic Key
He Leans Homeward
House
Taking the Train to Fredericton
The Passageway
Walking Away
What the Bestiary Said
Sentient Beings
Sleep’s Ova
Banns
Afterword: Flying Over Language | Don Domanski
Acknowledgments