Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. His latest work, All Our Wonder Unavenged (Brick Books) recently won the Governor General’s Literary Award for Poetry.

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.

The nature imagery is interlaced with references to Buddhism, Greek mythology, ancient civilizations and even witches. The poems don’t transcend the material world so much as find the spirit in what we can see, touch, and hear. Domanski asserts that the deity is in all things.

my mother believed God moved the sparrows around day after day
as a teenager I believed the sparrows moved God around
all the inexhaustible crutches He leaned upon
all the underweights of silence to find His way

now the only god I believe in are the sparrows themselves

Don Domanski was recently interviewed by CBC. Here are some excerpts.

CBC: Your work brings the inanimate to life. What draws you to blur the line between the animate and inanimate world?

It probably comes from childhood originally, children blur that line all the time, giving life to inanimate objects, to toys and dolls, because they can’t imagine it otherwise. What I’m doing is making my way to presence, and blurring that line helps to draw out the inherent presence in things. My definition of life is isness, its elementary stance and grace, therefore everything is alive, simply put being equals life. Now I know this isn’t the usual definition, but still it is an ancient one, not just among children, but among people from all cultures.

I’m an animist when it comes to how I interact with the physical world. Animism is the oldest religious/spiritual practice, the base experience out of which all the other ways of the sacred have grown. So I guess you could say I’m a traditionalist of a sort, a basic believer in first experiences, whether it’s cultural or ones from childhood. There’s a very deep truth there that strikes well below the thinking level, a connection richer than language, which can give words a more inclusive depth and reach.

CBC: What draws you to geology and palaeontology as subjects for your writing?

I’ve always been interested in the natural sciences, so it seems almost instinctive that geology and palaeontology should find their way into my work. I collected fossils for fourteen years, to try and get some sense of time, some understanding of the permutations of time on life. Of course in the end it’s time out of mind, it’s impossible to grasp what two hundred million years actually means. But there were moments in this hunt for time that shone forth with a particular light I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. For instance, finding the impressions of raindrops that were three hundred and fifty million years old. The rain falling on a completely different planet then we live on today. That gives a new perspective, a new appreciation of being.

I see no difference between poetry and spiritual practice

CBC Interview with Don Domanski

Brick Books

Prairie Fire Review of Books

five apparitions are building a moth in the dark
they are nailing wings to fog wings to white powder
they are mixing milk and sulphur in an iron bowl

for its heart they have made the sound of a carousel
coming to a full stop
for its lungs they have made the sound of a train
filling with snow

in one stone they’ve found enough language
in one shadow enough thought

they are building a small evil in the dark
a blood drop a flake of dry skin
a demon with a shawl of fine lace
sewn into its back

not the amount of evil a man has
but the evil contained in a blade of grass
a real evil
a moth flying out of a sparrow’s throat
and into the evening air

Don Domanski, “Devildom”
from “Hammerstroke”, 1986

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To read Don Domanski’s poem, Devildom, about an evil as elusive as fog, an evil made of wings and white powder, stops us short. The poem takes on a topicality we don’t generally look for from Domanski, also the author of The Cape Breton Book of the Dead; he is more rooted in the metaphysical realm than in the daily news. Domanski examines evil here, as part of the fabric of the real, as the yin-yang dance partner of good.

In Devildom, evil is built into the world, not in a single moment of creation, but continuously, and on a modest scale.

Why a moth? Perhaps precisely because it’s so small and fragile. But there is also the imagery of the Death’s Head Moth, the “fine lace shawl” on its back revealing a skull. That a harmless creature should fly through the world tattooed like a bottle of poison may be Nature’s version of irony.

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Don Domanski has been fortunate to be blessed with a few canny critics. He’s been called a seer and a necromancer of words, “a cross between Robert Bly, Ted Hughes, and the Brothers Grimm,” and the poems have been variously described as “earthy and astral, dark and buoyant,” “half fairytale and half flesh.” There is something consistent in these descriptions; they indicate the marriage of opposites stirring at the core of his poetry, what one critic has called “the struggle to bring the cosmos and its citizens to us whole”.

Domanski’s poetry, when read with attention and openness, traverses the ordinary and the extraordinary, illuminating both. He takes our daily objects and experiences, and by carefully relating them to each other, in unexpected contexts, transforms our entire version of reality. But this isn’t magic. It’s metaphor.

Rilke’s poem, The Reader, captures the uncanny way words on a page can create a world so rich and involving it’s like experiencing an alternate reality. Domanski’s work is intimate too; many of his poems arise from his observations while, say, walking by a river or driving through a downpour at night; everything from fireflies and bats to sea turtles and clouds engage his meditative curiosity.

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Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and now lives in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He has published eight books of poetry. Two of his books (Wolf Ladder, 1991, and Stations of the Left Hand, 1994) were short-listed for the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. In 1999 he won the Canadian Literary Award for Poetry.

Northern Poetry Review