Selected Poems, 1975-2021 (Paperback) (Don Domanski)

‘a rare poet capable of changing lives’
(Tim Lilburn)

 

‘there is no better poet writing in English’
(Mark Strand)

 

‘a necromancer of words, a seer’
(Lorna Crozier)

This book is a celebration of the work of one of Canada’s finest poets, Don Domanski. First published in an extremely limited hardcover edition in 2021, the Selected Poems is now available for the first time in a beautiful softcover version. As before, it distils his forty-five-year career into 108 poems gathered from the nine collections published during his lifetime, most of which are now out-of-print:

 

The Cape Breton Book of the Dead (1975)
Heaven (1978)
War in an Empty House (1982)
Hammerstroke (1986)
Wolf-Ladder (1991)
Stations of the Left Hand (1994)
Parish of the Physic Moon (1998)
All Our Wonder Unavenged (2007)
Bite Down Little Whisper (2013)

 

This new edition also retains the Uncollected section from the hardcover, which features the poems first published by Corbel Stone Press, beginning with the 2014 pamphlet “Field Notes”, and followed by those featured in the journal Reliquiae: “Bestiary of the Raindrop”, “Birthday”, “A Thin Place”, “Nocturne” and “The Goneness of Lost Things”. These poems have been subsequently republished in the posthumous collection, Fetishes of the Floating World. As before, the Uncollected section ends with “A Prayer of Thanks”, written for the Summer Solstice of 2017, and the book closes with his seminal essay, “Poetry and the Sacred”.

 

Not simply essential for previous admirers of his work, this collection is a much-needed antidote to the anthropocentrism that prevails in contemporary Western culture. It is surely requisite reading for anyone sensitive to our current global environmental crisis, and to the needs of the other-than-human world.