Fetishes of the Floating World

Product Description Governor General's Award-winning poet Don Domanski's posthumous last collection once again melds perception-expanding environmental poetry and metaphysics into a seamless, moving lyric whole.Fetishes of the Floating World continues Don's lifelong exploration of mystical ecology. It is an invitation to experience the sacred dimensions of what-is and to become more intimate with the strangeness that haunts our lively, changeable world. Here is a spirituality that doesn't turn its back on the material and immerses us in earthly being.The sustained apprehension of deep time underlies every moment of this work; every moment is held up against that more-than-human span and is relinquished to it. Domanski's full-bodied, incantatory language will penetrate your very marrow, calling you out of yourself to testify to the world's "inclement graces.""Domanski's poems are intimate, but intimate on a grand scale. As far as I am concerned, there is no better poet writing in English." - Mark Strand on All Our Wonder Unavenged Review "Stunningly beautiful and delicate, All Our Wonder Unavenged is a deeply moving vision about the intricacies of the everyday world. A spiritual and metaphysical triumph." - Jury Citation, Governor General's Award for Poetry"All Our Wonder Unavenged represents the mature accomplishment of a poet with a unique, finely honed voice. Cape Breton native Don Domanski speaks to a wholeness of being in poems that are intimate yet vast, specific yet breathtakingly universal." - Jury Citation, Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award About the Author Don Domanski was born and raised on Cape Breton Island and lived for many years in Halifax, Nova Scotia. He is the author of nine previous books of poetry. His 2007 collection All Our Wonder Unavenged was honoured with the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia Masterworks Award, and the Atlantic Poetry Prize. In 2014 he won the J.M. Abraham Poetry Award for Bite Down Little Whisper. Published and reviewed internationally, his work has been translated into Czech, French, Portuguese, Arabic, Chinese and Spanish. He died on September 7, 2020. Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved. we're all slaves to something for me it'sthat whitetail standing motionless on the shoresaint of the held breath saint of the afterimageand just behind him the unborn resettledtucked in beneath dogwoods with their milkteeth jewelling down their spineshearing only the atonal gossipof the untranslatablesighs and cries from the edges of things. --from "Field Notes" A Fox-Shaped Absencenow I stand where you once lived I steppedthrough slant light of the fading day and foundyour home among fallen feathers and dried stalksof goldenrod here you began the infinitesimalsloughing off of memory and started to eraseyour secret names here beetles now moveamong your bones trilling quietly to themselveshere your every thought was a shiver of silenceup the spine and your last breath createda fox-shaped absence in the world here on yourlast night you ended your light-sensitive dialoguewith the moon while the blood-colouredmaple leaves fell on the golden onesand the underworld felt the crushing weight.