Works by
Don Domanski
(Poet)
[1950 - ]

All Our Wonder Unavenged (2007) -- Winner Governor General's Award
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.

Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski (2007) with Brian Bartlett, ed.
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.

Parish of the Physic Moon (1998)
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.

Stations of the Left Hand (1994)

Wolf-Ladder (1991)

Hammerstroke (1986)

War in an Empty House (1982)

Heaven (1978)

The Cape Breton Book of the Dead (1975)