Carmine: It’s been a good year for Don Domanski. He publishes his first book of poetry in nine years (his last, Parish of the Physic Moon, came out in 1998), has a critical study devoted to him, Earthly Pages, and then, completing the hat-trick, gets a GG nod. It's a dominant return to form for someone who’s been dormant for so long, and makes me wonder if there isn't more discretionary goodwill waiting to be spent on him. I think he has an inside chance of winning, especially when you take into account that he’s been nominated for the prize twice before (like McKay's Griffin victory, maybe third time's the charm). And considering the shortlist, I wouldn't at all be displeased.

Here's why: Domanski's poetry evinces an unmistakable vision. His readers sometimes make it out to be more wise and original than it really is, but at least it can’t be confused with anyone else's. This individuality rests on a kind of unfashionable cosmological re-seeing. Taking All Our Wonders Unavenged as an example, I can't think of another Canadian poet who would write metaphors like "all day makers of edges have been cutting / into the emptiness from every side" or "sorrel blossoms bending forward to untie their yellow hair" or "the small agonies of the windshield wipers / their wet pules drawn across the glass."  As a result, it can be hard to figure out where to put him. Vocabulary-wise, he embraces the abstract ("emptiness") and archaic ("pules") with equal ease, his sense of form feels liturgical, he talks in a voice at once intimate, unironic, ceremonious, and he handles natural details with fascinating gentleness. He reminds me at times of Tim Lilburn, and while he can't rise to Lilburn's theological crescendos, Domanski poems, at their best, achieve a better balance of cadence and meaning, and, with it, a clarity that’s fiercer and more foreboding. (It's funny to see Dewdney as one of the jurors because I don't think there’s a line in this book that he wouldn't covet for his own poems.) Anyway being such an odd duck poet makes Domanski, I think, a salutary presence; especially for young poets trying to find the courage of their idiosyncrasies.

But I'm digressing. Let me say a few more words about the book itself. All Our Wonder Unavenged is of a piece with Domanski’s other books, all of which regard poetry as a rite of passage into dreamlike vistas. "I bed with the moony shapes," he wrote back in 1978, "with my trapshut head / and dun heart." His lines have become a little looser over the decades, but the poems are still written using the same head and heart, they still resemble the primitivist field reports of a poet reconnoitering his surroundings into you-are-here catalogues of  intuitive sense-impressions, where a spider’s web becomes the "abacus of her viscera" or where "the shadows of rabbits sleep among hounds" or where the poet sits beside "loosestrife signaling back from / their listening posts." In fact, if anything, this self-positioning tendency - where poetry is a kind of GPS of the soul - is now even more marked in this new book ("I’m watching each direction add up the sunlight / making a day of it"), and it leaves readers to travel in a psychedelic pastoral underworld that seems to double as a spiritual autobiography. It's Domanksi’s most personal book, and the poems are more compelling for it.

I'm compelled to offer a few caveats. Domanski is prone to a wide-eyed dreaminess and at times his poems do nothing more than trumpet the vast secret significance of all things. Domanski also sentimentalizes his own sublimity-hungry sensibility, which makes him go soft on his art. A sense of form so open-ended, punctuationless, and non-cohering means that a great deal of tension leaks out of these poems. Most of them could have been ten lines longer or five shorter: it makes no difference, when the fact is, as far as poetry is concerned, such things make all the difference. Any fool can get into a poem, Frost once said, but it takes a poet to get out of one. And at his worst, Domanksi's metaphysical word-wafting goes on far too long (I got bored of "In the Dream of the Yellow Birches" after section four. If there's anything interesting in the next seven sections, let me know). It would have been better had Domanksi's editor taken his or her job a little more seriously and talked him out of 25 pages. But fat books seem a signature of the press. Brick seems to treat editing as a benign act, nothing more than a friendly send-off and a best-of-luck handshake.

Anyway, Domanski deserves his GG close-up. If someone wanted a place to start before deciding to buy this book, I say pages 110-113, with their two striking poems,  "A Trace of Finches" and "The Field Sadness."

Paul: I, too, thought very highly of Domanski's book, for many of the same reasons Carmine did, and I wouldn't be at all displeased to see this book take home the grand prize, but on this shortlist, it's not the one I would personally choose to win (more on that later).

Domanski has a knack for conjuring memorable, often ominous, images from fairly banal materials. It's a knack that mostly serves him well, though sometimes he attempts to push this gift into the realm of the intangible, and it’s precisely this kind of equivocation that maroons his poems on the rocky shores between the unintelligible and the pseudo-spiritual, as witnessed in the opening lines of the poem, "Footsteps on Black Water." 

May blowing against the martyrdom
of the other side            against the spirits
we’ve designed to carry us over            licensed
to lift us out of the body at the end

Now wait just a minute. What is blowing against what? In the fog of all this contrived theology, I find myself craving an honest, physical noun long before we get to "body," which has been forced, Atlas-like, to bear the weight of being the only image we can actually visualize in this entire stanza, and left twisting in the May, without setting, without context, the body becomes moot, impossible to know and thus powerless to affect our sensibilities.

But open the book to the very first poem, part one of  "Leaning on Silk," and treat yourself to Domanski at his best. The second stanza alone contains an image so eerie, so original (and yet so perfect it must have always been there, waiting to be discovered), it stayed with me for the entire book and long after. Here it is:

all night the house felt like it was underwater
red gills beneath each shingle opening and closing
     to receive the air

Now we see the life-giving power of image and metaphor at its most haunting and compelling, and All Our Wonder Unavenged is teeming with these moments. The poet and critic George Woodcock, in reference to another great Canadian poet, once wrote, "Purdy’s work has the effortless, gratuitous magic which has been the sign of a good poet in any age." I’ve always liked the wording of that criterion: effortless, gratuitous magic. It's something, whatever it might be, that I always seek out in the poetry I read, and I find it all too rarely. But I’ve found a storehouse of it in this book by Don Domanski; so much so that his occasional indiscretions with rambling, insubstantial poeticisms are to be, for the greater part, forgiven.

Alex: One issue that I find keeps coming up with this jury is how to approach a book that is full of ups and downs. The reason it keeps coming up is because this is the nature of most collections: There are some poems you really like and then there's a lot of stuff that seems like filler. Blame the editor, sure, but you still have to deal with what's there. And that 
means all of it.

Which brings me to All Our Wonder Unavenged. I found this to be a very uneven book. And I would go further than "occasional indiscretions," Paul. Not that there isn't some great stuff. Vague and dreamy, yes, but moments like these were unmatched in any of the other books on this year's shortlist:

sometimes the self peels away in late afternoon
moving off as the heat of the day collects on the faithful
on all those children playing madly in yards
all those flies with their snouts in the silk
those dogs running hard in their sleep
our lives wander off for a moment or an hour
and we never wish them back            it simply returns
simply enough like fetishes of absence
the shadowy idea of empty space
or the bodies of ghosts clinging
like damp newspapers to grass and to our wrists
as we reach for the car door            driving away
shredding numberless haunts of a physical world

I love his evocation of the clinging material, physical world in weird images like the wet newspapers, flies caught in silk, and the automatic muscular gesture of our wrists reaching for the car door. And it's hard to forget how this poem ends: "While the rain comes handing out darkness / like books to be read."

I get the sense Domanski's vision is a bit like Whitman's or Blake's, which can lead him to go on and on in a vapid, vatic mode. At times he does pick up the incantatory rhythm and drive you mention Carmine, like near the end of "Leviathan" with its Biblical laying down the law, but more often than not I felt like I was wading through a great deal of roughage. Overall I thought the book was very hit and miss with regard to the imagery. I found myself blinking at how "the moonlight shines like ten thousand women / about to speak," and the no-see-ums with "their bodies bound tightly as the gospels." My attention started to wander. I'm glad you mentioned the archaic "pules" Carmine, because I remembered that word as "pulse." The lines in question, I should say, are as follows: "the small agonies of the windshield wipers / their wet pules drawn across the glass." Come to think of it, I'm not sure "pulse" isn't better, and might have been what was intended. "Pulse" is, in fact, a word used elsewhere in the book. Maybe it was a typo? Did you notice how the section entitled "In the Dream of the Yellow Birches" in the table of contents, and in the title of the poem "In the Dream of the Yellow Birches," is given as "In the Dream of the Silver Birches" in the book?

Adding to this sense of unformed raw material, at least to me, was the lack of punctuation. I found this to be pointless (no pun intended). Are the line gaps simply in lieu of commas? Do they indicate a pause, or act as a rhytmical unit? I don't see how you read these lines differently just because of the way they're arranged on the page.

Maybe this is Domanski's point. At the end of the poem "Ars Poetica" he describes what seems to be the instinctual, primitive source of language, somewhere down in the "backwash of instinct . . . moving slowly toward syntax . . . making language out of what / is seamless and inconsolable." "[T]his," he goes on to say, "is the voice we hear above the page." And so much of the book is a walk through the woods of the collective unconscious, listening to the ur-speech whistle through the trees.

Which brings me back to the question of how you weigh the best against the rest when evaluating any collection. Yes, I think Domanski owns the best poetry on this shortlist. But quite a bit of this book is mush, either over my head or "above the page." 

Carmine: "Pules" isn't a typo. Not only does its meaning fit the logic of the metaphor but it's exactly the kind of rare word Domanski, judging from past practice, would use, with its archaism contributing to the estranging effect. Your misreading may have shaken your confidence in the word, but it was definitely intended.

I share your questions about Domanksi's "line gaps." He's not the only one who uses them - you do see it being done here and there. The only place where I've seen it used well is by James Dickey in his long poem "Falling" where the gaps heighten the effect of speed (the poem is based on news reports of a stewardess plummeting from a plane). As far as I understand the device is intended as a very emphatic caesura. In his essay "The Poet Turns on Himself" Dickey talks about the "split line" where "spaces between the word groups would take the place of punctuation." This is how Domanki seems to use it, where he puts what would be two or three short lines on one line, for example: "the storyline    dark beginning     dark end." Of course, it's also easy to find evidence in the book of where the device is merely decorative, a trick to give the poems the look of genius-flashes that can't be contained by syntax or punctuation.

Alex: Never one to prevent a trivial, purely speculative point from blossoming . . .

I don't think we can say, in the absence of further evidence, that "pules" was "definitely intended." I think it's at least possible that it's a typo. I say this for the following reasons:

(1) "Pulse," I think, might be a better word. Windshield wipers do have a wet pulse. They can even be set on "pulse." Most windshield wipers, however, do not pule unless they are old and worn out or frozen. I did have wipers that puled on one car I drove a few years back, but it's not the norm. Pule would fit with the "small agonies," but otherwise it's a stretch of vocabulary.

(2) Pulse, on the other hand, would not be a stretch, being the more obvious word and one that Domanski must have had in his head while writing these poems since he uses it elsewhere.

(3) Again as previously noted, there are copy-editing issues in the book since the section "In the Dream of the Yellow Birches" is apparently mis-titled "In the Dream of the Silver Birches" at one point. So it wouldn't be hard at all to imagine the transposition of a single letter in this one word. As I said earlier, when I first read the poem I saw "pulse" and wasn't aware of my misreading until I read your comments, Carmine.

Of course pules may be the right word. But I think there's at least a chance it isn't.

NEXT: Reading Nerve Language