Pondering A Hummingbird's Heart*

Don Domanski's All Our Wonder Unavenged is just a brilliant, brilliant collection of poems. I was expecting good poems (it won the Governor General's Award for poetry in 2007, after all), but wow. This is the kind of collection every poem-lover should have a copy of.

It contains a wonderful mix of the metaphysical and the mundane, the observable and observed with the unobservable and transformative. And he makes full use of the pause within the line. His use of metaphor is startling, in a good way, and if you like poetry that electrifies language, this is the collection for you.

Syntactically interesting, especially in how Domanski organizes the pauses within the lines, filled with images and language that linger and stick in the mind, I just keep returning to poem after poem. Wondering, 'how did he do that?' and 'look at how this line just spills its sounds over into the next' . . . and on and on, marvelling over the likes of "the rain falling with the names of everything / the rain falling with more secrets than we can hold" ("A Petition to Clouds") and "it'll find the god of hawks / nesting in the dark reach / of all ascension" ("The Feather").

And how intimate it feels while reading, like the speaker's voice is just over your shoulder, pointing out this and that, causing you to observe and reflect at every turn. The observations so careful, so minute, so immediate. Clouds and feathers, raindrops and sparrows, calligraphy and insects: "to write poetry is to sign-off the words yourself / take them from the visible and return them to the invisible / burnishing the backs of beetles as you go" ("Ars Poetica").

The sacred, the mythic, the beautiful, it's in there.


*Note: One of the poems is titled "A Hummingbird's Heart Beats 1260 Times A Minute" . . . it's a prose poem that doesn't forget it's a poem.