Writings / Reviews: Candace Fertile

Pages: 1 2

Spread the love

Bite Down Little Whisper
by Don Domanski,
London, ON: Brick Books,
98 pp. $20

 

On the surface, Don Domanski writes nature poetry, but really, his work strikes me more as secular prayer than anything else. He grapples with the big issues in a highly serious and highly abstract way even though much of his imagery is of flora and fauna. Whatever the concrete content, the poems move towards the ineffable. And that contradiction between the elements of nature and the metaphysical inquiry, implicit or explicit, sets up a constant and engaging tension.

Bite Down Little Whisper, Domanski’s ninth book of poetry, is dense and literary. It’s not in the Billy Collins’ let me entertain you school of poetry. Nope, not at all. And that’s good. Domanski appears committed to the idea that poetry means something, even if the meaning is hard to parse. In fact, given the level of diction and allusion, the poems appear designed to demand time and attention. And they reward the effort.

Stylistically, Domanski is consistent. Capitals are rarely employed, and periods are used at the end of stanzas or poems. No other punctuation makes an appearance. Line length and spaces provide the plan for reading. So while the poems can be more than a page long, because of their construction, they retain elements of imagism. Pieces of poems make pictures. Repetition creates rhythm and emphasis, even a mild incantatory effect. And all the pictures add up to an elaborate consideration of the meaning of life.

The book has three parts: “Foresight by Earth,” “A Feral Trance,” and “The Light of Unoccupied Memory.” Those titles are also titles for individual poems. The book’s title poem is in the second section, and its six parts are a calm and plaintive consideration of the position of human beings in the world:

so bite down little whisper   right there
where we live layered between form
and formlessness

Life is a process, an existential becoming perhaps. As Domanski writes in the collection’s first poem, “Ursa Immaculate”:

solitude is our nourishment and redemption
in a world that is sensed rather than understood
quietude our reprieve form the skin-trade
of language

Just as the line of poetry moves forward, so does life. Until it ends.

The poem that has taken up residence in my head, in large part because I love the title is “The Light of Unoccupied Memory.” I can only feel what that means. But Domanski gives us much to work with in this six-part poem:

yet we get on with our lives    having no choice
everything explained and unexplained    the future already
a memory    collecting in the folds of things.

Long or short, the poems are intricate and precise, full of allusion and literary and scientific diction. It helps to have a dictionary handy. It helps to just be immersed in the mental world of Don Domanski. It’s worth it.

 

Pages: 1 2

Leave A Comment...

*