Earthly Pages

The Poetry of Don Domanski

Don Domanski, Brian Bartlett

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2007
• Print ISBN: 9781554580088
• eBook ISBN: 9781554580705
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Biographies
• Index: Literature

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.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Biographical Note
• Introduction: The Trees Are Full of Rings
• Beldam
• Angels
• Summer Job: Hospital Morgue
• 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
• Acknowledgements