The Time of Falling Apart by Wendy Donawa

The Time of Falling Apart by Wendy Donawa, at 111 pages, not including notes, is a chunky poetry collection with 3 sections: That Sensible Planning-Ahead Thing, Between Ground and Feast, and A Life Full of Days. It moves steadily over its own rough ground of time of life when one’s intimates are dying or with cancer, and when mortality is more pressing than usual. As with movies that start gritty and move to hope, or start sunlit and move to grim, this book has an arc starting quiet and small and becoming more vivid and joyful as it progresses, as if affirming to live every day.

It starts in a timeframe marked by reflection, taking stock, gathering bouquets of memories from school years onwards, shaking your head at your own heedless feckless, naïve youth; “Scornful of all that was snug, post-war cozy.” (“How I Reacted to My Parents”, p. 17).

Events long distant can have that distance to their telling mediated by wandering through a dictionary (“Who Hasn’t Leaned Over the Bridge Rail, Beguiled”, p. 29).

	Pleasure is different. Its roots travel well,
	from the Latin placere, affording satisfaction, to Old French plaisir,
	while the late 14th century defined pleasure as discretion, will and desire.
	Those ancestors hoped for eternal happiness,

I like the sense of time folding in on itself. Our lives are not immaterially different from past generations. The broad strokes are the same in lived experience in any century. That said, I’m not sure I’m the ideal audience given that an epigraph is from Arleen Paré who I never feel I “get”. But with anything we encounter, we absorb what we can and it may provide footholds for what is to come.

I was surprised to find a well-done haibun tucked in there. It isn’t a common form. In “The Morning After His Funeral” (p. 31), the end haiku is superbly moving.

	late bees tunnel
	in fallen peaches—
	too late to harvest

It carries with it something of the book’s overarching tone of bittersweet regret.

A particularly striking poem is reflecting on a self-portrait painted at age 30, “Scorch of Time,” (p. 36) a knowing laugh at how sure we all used to be:

	the righteousness I had before the scorch of time.
	That girl’s level stare confronts onlookers.
	She could take on the world. She’ll have had a place in art history.
	She bought a used Vespa for ninety dollars and covered the metropole,
	grabbed the world’s here and now. I miss who I was.

The second section opens with the title poem, with the universal (?) thought (p. 41):

	How is it that I who careened merrily
	across two provinces, three mountain ranges
	to meet my lover,
	now avoid night driving, parallel parking?

I like how the poems are given reign so one may start with the the idea of meditation by looking yourself in your own eyes in a mirror for hours, and end with noticing the hummingbird, “Aggressive little brute, if it was the size of a chicken,/ that stiletto beak would be a yard long, could skewer you” (“In This Morning’s Podcast a Japanese Writer Speaks of Contemplative Focus, p. 58).

As you can see there, Donawa has a flair for images and phrase. See also in section 2, the sense of verve rises. The righteousness from earlier isn’t gone. “For evil to prevail,/a dismal absence of empathy and energy/will do the trick. Evil as banal as dishcloths.” (Not Somewhere Else But Here, p. 73). At the same time, this anger at injustice is grounded with appreciation for natural beauty.

Where the book opened in loss, it closes in praise of a model of abundance, laughter, kisses, spices. In “Its Miraculous Blue” (p. 105), she fends off the idea of quiet fade and affirms, from age 82, “we aged have never felt more passionate.”

Hats off to Donawa for twisting the narrative of ‘I miss how bold I used to be,’ to seeing how bold we still can be. Bravo for thriving, not obediently muting oneself and dying.

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 lək̓ʷəŋən (Lekwungen-speaking) Esquimalt and Songhees people, in Victoria, BC.Sort:

Publisher: Harbour Publishing (September 23, 2025)
Paperback 9″ x 6″ | 126 pages
ISBN: 9781998526307

Pearl Pirie

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Pearl Pirie's latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet