Don Domanski


Don Domanski was a Canadian poet.

Biography

Domanski was born and raised in Sydney, Nova Scotia, and lived briefly in Toronto, Vancouver and Wolfville, before settling in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where he lived for most of his life. Author of nine collections of poetry, his work has been translated into Arabic, Chinese, Czech, French, Portuguese, and Spanish. In a review of Wolf-Ladder John Bradley described Domanski's poetry as "earthy and astral, dark and buoyant, a cross between Robert Bly, Ted Hughes, and the Brothers Grimm."
In 1999 he received the Canadian Literary Award for Poetry from CBC. 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. Domanski mentored other poets through the Banff Centre for the Arts Wired Writing Studio and the Writers' Federation of Nova Scotia Mentorship program.
Also a visual artist, he created art that appeared in galleries in Halifax and Seoul, South Korea, and on covers of his poetry collections. Domanski also collected fossils for over a decade, and subsequently turned his attention to meteorites and Stone Age tools. He found a neural arch of a 350-million-year-old amphibian previously thought to have gone extinct in the Devonian period. He was given credit for the find in Amphibian Biology, Vol. 4, Palaeontology, The Evolutionary History of Amphibians, ed. Harold Heatwole and Robert L. Carroll. His interest in religions inspired visits to churches and cathedrals in France, Ireland, England and Argentina, mosques in Istanbul, Rumi's tomb in Konya, and Buddhist temples and monasteries in China.

Poetry collections

  • 1975: The Cape Breton Book of the Dead
  • 1978: Heaven
  • 1982: War in an Empty House
  • 1986: Hammerstroke
  • 1991: Wolf-Ladder
  • 1994: Stations of the Left Hand
  • 1998: Parish of the Physic Moon
  • 2007: All Our Wonder Unavenged
  • 2013: Bite Down Little Whisper
  • 2021: ''Fetishes of the Floating World''

    Pamphlets

  • 2006: All Our Wonder Unavenged
  • 2006: Poetry and the Sacred
  • 2014: Field Notes
  • 2015: ''Fetishes of the Floating World''

    Anthologies

  • 2007: Earthly Pages: The Poetry of Don Domanski
  • 2021: Selected Poems, 1975-2021
  • 2022: ''Selected Poems, 1975-2021''

    Honours

  • 1999 –
  • 2007 – Governor General's Award for All Our Wonder Unavenged
  • 2008 – The Atlantic Poetry Prize for All Our Wonder Unavenged
  • 2008 – for All Our Wonder Unavenged
  • 2014 – J.M. Abraham Poetry Award for Bite Down Little Whisper