Wild Service
I offer rituals, poetry performances, and workshops in service to Earth in Transition.
I offer the following collective group rituals in service to Earth in Transition.
Heart-Crack of Crisis - Poetry Ritual - A ritual of poetry and music that uses the deep image, rhythm, breath and power of poetry in combination with music to speak into our collective psyche around planetary emergency.
Collective Heart-Crack Ritual - A group ritual of facing, moving with, being together, and holding each other in crisis.
Earth Mass - A ritual dedicated to bringing us together as community, to restitch and reweave our communities together with the Earth.
Evolution Earth Ritual - A ritual as a love song to our planet and a journey through its evolutionary pathway towards creating organisms that are complex and intelligent enough to feel and become love.
Remembering Self as Earth Ritual - A ritual of remembering ourselves as part of the whole, as intimately connected with our own bodies, each other, and all life on earth.
Wild Service Ritual - A ritual to connect you into wild service as part of the whole, to feel and experience how earth wants to move through you and stand inside of you at this moment of time.
I haven’t come across anything like this – the astounding poems in Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage writhe with raw visionary life, as if made of bone and fire. They terrify and hypnotise. They are chants of survival, incantations to bear us safely through climate collapse and mass extinction. They draw our elemental selves out onto burning fields, and miraculously heal us. This is poetry as initiation, as Orphic oracle and rigorous truth telling.’
— Pascale Petit
My belief is that we, as a culture, and as part of earth are in transition, that the crises we currently face are a point of initiation for us as a collective whole, to chose how we want to live on earth.
The spaces I hold are designed to bring us more deeply together in this unique moment of time we are living through, to unite, and find ways towards remembering our common humanity, that ultimately what unites us is our earth, and that while we have each other, we have hope.
Heart Crack of Crisis: A Poetry Ritual, is a poetry performance that acts as ritual of transfiguration, using the deep image, metaphor, and power of poetry and music to speak deep into our collective psyche around what it means to be alive in crisis.
The poetry ritual moves through several phases and states, from awakening to crisis, through ecological grief, uncertainty and pain of collapse, towards the possibility of individual and collective transformation through the heart-crack of crisis.
The ritual is both a meditation on our current state of emergency and a prayer for hope, unity, and collective response.
Workshop options
Each workshop is opened with a woven performance of poetry and music, supporting us to enter the felt sense of crisis together.
Poetry + Guitar + Workshop
Poetry - Violin - Workshop
Poetry - Piano - Workshop
‘I’m passionate about the earth, creativity and the power of listening to the wisdom of our bodies. I believe that the current series of crises can be a turning point for humanity and our relationship with the earth if we allow. And I believe that everyone has a role to play and can become an empowered cell of the earth.’
About Rite of Passage
Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage is an initiation into what it means to be alive on the planet in the midst of extinction, of climate, environmental and systematic collapse. It is a journey into the shadow of man’s distorted relationship with the earth. And yet in the utter darkness of this hour, these often provocative poems suggest that there is hope. That we have had to come to the edge of our own annihilation as a species to collectively shift how we live, that only in the dark glare of this crisis, can a new world from the ashes of the old one now be formed.
Praise for Rite of Passage
Fiona Benson
Stark, original, obsessive, and visionary, the poems in ‘Rite of Passage’ are prophecies of an uncanny musicality. Imagine a blend of Cormac McCarthy and Louise Glück and you begin to approach an understanding of the frightening desecrations and oracular clarities of this book. Bury walks through the burnings of an accelerated world, through drought and miscarried years, through snow and nuclear fallout, bringing poems of apocalyptic horror and raw beauty, returning us with new consciousness to the fallen world. The prayer is implicit throughout – let us stop, let us wake to new light. This book is fire.
Pascale Petit
‘I haven’t come across anything like this – the astounding poems in Dom Bury’s Rite of Passage writhe with raw visionary life, as if made of bone and fire. They terrify and hypnotise. They are chants of survival, incantations to bear us safely through climate collapse and mass extinction. They draw our elemental selves out onto burning fields, and miraculously heal us. This is poetry as initiation, as Orphic oracle and rigorous truth telling.’
Niall Campbell
An astonishing debut. The environment has never felt so urgent; the world, through Bury’s writing, has never felt so close at hand. Mythical and raw – a terrific book.”
Biography
My poems have found homes in a number of leading national and international magazines and journals including Poetry Review, Poetry London, Poetry Ireland, Poetry Wales, Magma, Ambit, Iota, The North, Oxford Poetry, The New European, Best British Poetry, Staying Human: new poems for Staying Alive (Bloodaxe Books, 2020), and 100 Poems to Save The World (Seren 2021)
Rite of Passage and poems from the book have received an Eric Gregory Award, a Jerwood/Arvon Mentorship, ‘The Opened Field’ won The 2017 National Poetry Competition, ‘Snow Country’ won The 2014 Magma Poetry Prize, and ‘Brother’ won 2nd Prize in The 2017 Resurgence Ecopoetry Competition.
My work has been performed on BBC Radio 4, at Aldeburgh, Ledbury and other poetry festivals, and has been made into award winning film by the mercurial Film Director Helmie Stil.
Into the Father’s Shadow
About Into the Father’s Shadow (seeking agent representation)
‘Into the Father’s Shadow’ is a highly charged novel that focuses on the life of Tom Holt, who by day works as a Manny for a wealthy Notting Hill family and by night as a male escort. It is based on my own personal work and experiences. It is a book wrapped in absent fatherhood, the contradictions of post-modern masculinity and set against the back drop of a murder that Tom is adamant that he did not commit.
Editorial Feedback
‘Into the Father’s Shadow has a terrific central premise. The idea of a young man working as a nanny by day and an escort by night is a terrific hook for any prospective editor or agent; it’s just a really great idea, full of possibilities. When you throw in the discovery of a dead body while on an escort job, and the possibility of Tom’s two world’s colliding it gets even better.’
‘Dom’s prose style is very good indeed and much of his description is absolutely fantastic. Dom has an ability of describing settings, characters and action that brings stuff to life on the page and therefore into the readers mind and it’s no surprise he’s already an award winning poet.’ — Review by Doug Johnstone, Amazon bestseller and author of multiple crime thrillers published by Faber and Penguin.
Cornelia and The Dark
About Cornelia and the Dark (Seeking agent representation)
Cornelia and the Dark is the first in a series of illustrated children’s books (The Adventures of Cornelia Crow) about the ecstatic awakening of Cornelia Crow, who is drawn out one night into the darkness of the forest by the ecstatic power of life itself. It is a book about learning to be fully alive to the magic of the earth, about learning to trust the senses and vibrations of your body and letting the aliveness of your body become your guiding principle for living.