Fetishes of the Floating World

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; instead it offers us prehensile psalms, immerses us in earthly being. Domanski invites us to live with the mystery that inheres in the unparsable entanglements of place, drawing attention now to a flash mob of ants, now to lighting strikes and plankton, now to the creaking hinge on each blade of grass.

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.

As Mark Strand wrote of his previous work, ...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. This remains eminently true here, in his last collection.