Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski

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 wolvesâand 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 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 Sleepâs Ova Banns Afterword: Flying Over Language | Don Domanski Acknowledgments

About the Author :
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 Generalâs 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 has published many books of poetry and non-fiction, including The Watchmaker's Table, Ringing Here & There: A Nature Calendar, and Wanting the Day: Selected Poems. He teaches creative writing at Saint Mary's University in Halifax.

Review :
``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.'' -- Paul Milton -- Canadian Literature, 193, Summer 2007 ``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.'' -- Bert Almon -- Canadian Literature ``Disarmingly forthright, Domanski's exploration of intuition is inviting.'' -- Paul W. Harland, University of Alberta -- Journal of Canadian Poetry