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    Children of the Outer Dark: The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney
    Children of the Outer Dark: The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney
    Children of the Outer Dark: The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney
    Ebook103 pages2 hours

    Children of the Outer Dark: The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney

    By Christopher Dewdney

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    About this ebook

    A four-time Governor General’s-award nominee for both poetry and non-fiction, Christopher Dewdney is celebrated internationally as a writer and a visionary and is best known for his particular imagining of place and memory. Beginning with Paleozoic fossil formations in southwestern Ontario and moving through eons of natural history to cityscapes and the digital present, Dewdney’s poetics encapsulate often surreal experiences from radical and epiphenomenal perspectives. His writing vibrates in a standing wave between science and art, reason and myth—embedding geology, neurophysiology, linguistics, and post-digital technology within a play of transitory viewpoints. Children of the Outer Dark provides a geological survey of Dewdney’s poetic strata. The poems selected, along with their order of presentation, serve a critical function to mine diverse layers of development in Dewdney’s career. This collection will reward all those who seek inspiration and will provide teachers, students, and other writers with a short natural history of one of Canadas essential poetic minds.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateOct 21, 2009
    ISBN9781554587155
    Children of the Outer Dark: The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney
    Author

    Christopher Dewdney

    Christopher Dewdney is one of Canada's most articulate and thoughtful cultural commentators. He has published three books of popular non-fiction, including The Immaculate Perception, which was nominated for the Governor General's Award, and Last Flesh. He also penned 11 highly acclaimed books of poetry and won first prize for poetry in the CBC Literary Competition. Fluent in several scientific disciplines, Christopher Dewdney makes his home in Toronto, where he teaches creative writing at York University.

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      Book preview

      Children of the Outer Dark - Christopher Dewdney

      Children of the Outer Dark

      The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney

      Children of the Outer Dark

      The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney

      Selected

          with an

          introduction by

          Karl E. Jirgens

          and an

          afterword by

          Christopher Dewdney

      We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program for our publishing activities.

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Dewdney, Christopher, 1951–

      Children of the outer dark : the poetry of Christopher Dewdney / selected with an introduction by Karl E. Jirgens ; and an afterword by Christopher Dewdney.

      (Laurier poetry series)

      ISBN: 978-0-88920-515-4

      ISBN: 0-88920-515-9

      I. Jirgens, Karl   II. Title.   III. Series.

      PS8557.E846A65 2007     C811’.54     C2007-900689-2

      © 2007 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

      Waterloo, Ontario, Canada N2L 3C5

      www.wlupress.wlu.ca

      Cover image: Pamela Woodland, Untitled, © 2004. Colour photograph, with thanks to the Department of Archaeology and Classical Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University.

      Cover and text design by P.J. Woodland.

      Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

      This book is printed on Ancient Forest Friendly paper (100% post-consumer recycled).

      Printed in Canada

      No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

      Table of Contents

      Foreword, Neil Besner

      Biographical Note

      Introduction,Karl E. Jirgens

      Trees

      The Owl

      Nightwalker

      Coelacanth

      Sol du Soleil

      In the Critical Half-Light

      In a Manner of Fact

      Into the Maelstrom

      August

      That Night at Lake Huron

      On Attaining Remote Control

      This Is of Two Worlds

      Poem Using Lines Spoken by Suzanne

      United

      Dreadlocks at the Helm

      Souvenir

      Human Consciousness

      The Immaculate Perception

      Metaphor Templates

      Homonyms as Linguistic Necker Cubes

      Depth Sounding, Lake Windermere

      The Owls

      Ten Typically Geological Suicides

      Halcyon July in Algoma

      Demon Pond

      The Lynx in the Rapids

      November

      Winter Solstice

      Winter Hawk

      The World Poem

      Hollow Wind, Empty Stars

      Seven Electrical Angels

      Gravid Lux

      Fitting the Language Prosthesis

      Language Acquisition Trauma

      Afterword: A Note on the Poems, Christopher Dewdney

      Bibliography

      Glossary

      Foreword

      At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada—writing and publishing it, reading and thinking about it—finds itself in a strangely conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed.

      But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media—and there needs to be more, and more different kinds of publications, that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available.

      The hope that animates this new series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is that these volumes will help to create and sustain the larger readership that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly be better known at home.

      Our idea has been to ask a critic (sometimes herself a poet) to select thirty-five poems from across a poet’s career; write an engaging, accessible introduction; and have the poet write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology will be much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s work. Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope, the connections among, as well as the distances between, the life and the work.

      It was the ending of an Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the epigraph for The Diviners :but they had their being once / and left a place to stand on. Our poets still do, and they are leaving many places to stand on. We hope that this series will help, variously, to show how and why this is so.

      —Neil Besner

      General Editor

      Biographical Note

      Born May 9, 1951, in London, Ontario, Christopher Dewdney has published twelve books of poetry

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