The Time of Falling Apart: Poems

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In a voice that shifts from ironic and quirky to contemplative and speculative, The Time of Falling Apart follows the poet through the inevitable passage of memory and time, and a search for meaning in a world rife with injustice.

Without a traditional faith to navigate the horrors and wonders of life on earth, Wendy Donawa lingers with small beauties in a spiritual quest to keep love alive in a "darkening world."

The speaker's eyes are wide open on catastrophes of aging, illness and family strife. But early memories are idyllic, entangled in the tides and towns of Vancouver Island, grounded by the coast's sensory world: "the tide's pebbly click and shush / and crows cawing in the arbutus."

As she ages, the speaker's internal narrative expands to consider a wider world populated with casualties of colonizing desires, fuelled by competing ideologies and a destabilizing pandemic-the "time of falling apart." Here are the social hells of racism, war, colonial violence and homelessness. Here are despair over a damaged earth and grief over nature's destruction.

And yet, how not to notice when bees hum in the lavender, cyclamen gleams in December, and bears burrow in their marvellous, layered coats When Bach blasts on the sound system, friends and cappuccinos are at hand, and, at the back of it all, there is always the unfathomable, glorious mystery of the cosmos.

Elegiac, meditative and unwaveringly kind, this collection is for anyone who has felt unable to reconcile the implacable passing of time, but determined to recognize love and beauty wherever they may be found.

Reviews

"The Time of Falling Apart delights with its philosophical playfulness and a rich vocabulary that teaches as it pleases. Who knew desire had its roots in starlight Wendy Donawa moves deftly from grilled cheese sandwiches to galaxies, from humour to transcendence. Such sensual pleasure here, you can almost taste her poems."

-- "Susan Alexander, author of The Dance Floor Tilts and Nothing You Can Carry"

"At the edge of play in these poems there's wisdom, gained from a life fuelled by compassion, humour and irony, and perfectly rendered in this poet's story of the passing of time."

-- "David Zieroth, author of first here and then far"

"If you care about language, if you care about story, The Time of Falling Apart is a collection to treasure. In lines of robust length and strength, and with careful attention to detail, Wendy Donawa has created a strong and engaging poetic narrative of her immediate world, past, present, inside and out, the beautiful and the not so beautiful: what makes a person a person. Aptly named, The Time of Falling Apart fearlessly tracks what's at stake, for almost all of us, clearly identifying and tracing 'the pivot, the small death of now.'"

-- "Arleen Pare, winner of the Butler Book Prize and the Governor General's Award for Poetry"

"In The Time of Falling Apart, poet Wendy Donawa chronicles 'a life full of days, ' looking backward and inward through the prism of age. With unflinching honesty, semantic precision, and characteristic wit, Donawa gives voice to personal changes in the body alongside wide-scale social, political, and environmental upheaval. And yet, under and throughout there is delight--in her beloved, in beauty, in a hard-earned sense of grace in the face of mortality. She writes, 'The razor's edge of imminent loss/grows our appetites, voracious.' As Donawa contemplates the 'vast cosmic islands of stars' that make up the galaxies, or the 'chicory bloom flooding the verges with ... miraculous blue, ' the reader is drawn in by her ravenous gaze, her gratitude for such abundance, her ongoing proclamation: 'holy holy holy.'"

-- "Laura Apol, author of Cauterized"

"What can you say about a book of poems that ends with the line, 'each swift-winged glad-glowing day chimes' You can say yes to the voice that utters with such deep delight its chime of praise. You can applaud the passionate affirmation of experience that wings through Wendy Donawa's poems. And you can't help but be grateful for and return to The Time of Falling Apart, as it's a rich artistic document, a work that gathers up the years of an individual life, with its sorrows and triumphs, challenges and changes, reassembling it in the magical unity of poetry."

-- "Russell Thornton, author of The White Light of Tomorrow"

"With exquisite imagery and startling insights, these poems return us to our deepest selves, reminding us to embrace both the beauty and the sorrows of the world, that there can be no shadow without some light."

-- "Donna Kane, author of Asterisms"

Author Bio

Wendy Donawa left her natal Victoria as a young woman to settle in Barbados. She attended the University of the West Indies, taught college literature and became a curator at the Barbados Museum. Decades later, she returned to Victoria to complete her Ph.D., taught literature for several years and turned her focus to her first love, poetry. Her poetry collection, Thin Air of the Knowable (Brick Books, 2017), was longlisted for the Raymond Souster Award and a finalist for the Gerald Lampert Award. Her second collection, Our Bodies' Unanswered Questions (Frontenac House, 2021), launched with the Frontenac Quartet. The Time of Falling Apart is her third poetry collection. Her poems are published in Arc Poetry Magazine, Prairie Fire, Freefall, The New Quarterly, The Literary Review of Canada, Room and others. She is a contributing editor with Arc Poetry Magazine and a board member with Planet Earth Poetry reading series. She writes a monthly review, "Unpacking the Poem," celebrating the diversity and creativity of BC poets. She and her wife live gratefully on the unceded territory of the lkn (Lekwungen-speaking) Esquimalt and Songhees people, in Victoria, BC.