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    Kingdom, Phylum
    Kingdom, Phylum
    Kingdom, Phylum
    Ebook79 pages1 hour

    Kingdom, Phylum

    By Adam Dickinson

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    About this ebook

    Shortlisted for the 2007 Trillium Book Award for Poetry

    Ecologically aware poems, hardwired to the intellect and the heart in equal measure.

    Adam Dickinson's poems, with firm intellectual bite and imaginative scope, reach fresh levels of poetic -- and ecological -- awareness. Sometimes reminiscent of Wallace Stevens, sometimes of Christopher Dewdney, and with the ghost of Foucault always in attendance, they ply a language that is cool and precise on the surface to open into the deep resonance of geologic time. Imaginative and contemplative, this writing is bound to refresh the vision of the most world-weary reader.

    The poems in Kingdom, Phylum push the boundaries of thought and language. Bringing lyrical and unsystematic modes of understanding into play, and keeping his ear tuned to the many disruptions involved in taxonomical arrangement, Dickinson shows how poetry both participates in, and unsettles, the provisional orders which develop between word and world.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBrick Books
    Release dateSep 15, 2006
    ISBN9781771313063
    Kingdom, Phylum
    Author

    Adam Dickinson

    Adam Dickinson is a professor of poetry and poetics at Brock University. His first book, Cartography and Walking, was shortlisted for an Alberta Book Award. He lives in St. Catharines.

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      Book preview

      Kingdom, Phylum - Adam Dickinson

      KINGDOM, PHYLUM

      KINGDOM, PHYLUM

      Adam Dickinson

      Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

      Dickinson, Adam, 1974-

                  Kingdom, Phylum / Adam Dickinson.

      Poems.

      ISBN-13: 978-1-894078-54-2

      ISBN-10: 1-894078-54-3

                  I. Title.

      PS8557.I3235K56 2006         C811’.6         C2006-902307-7

      Copyright © Adam Dickinson, 2006

      We acknowledge the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of

      Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program

      (BPIDP), and the Ontario Arts Council for their support of our

      publishing program.

      Cover image by Victor Brauner. Loup-table (1939-1947). 54 x 57 x 28.5

      cm. Centre Pompidou, Paris. © Estate of Victor Brauner / SODRAC

      (2006). Photograph courtesy of Art Resource, New York City.

      Author photograph by Judy Townson.

      Design and layout by Alan Siu.

      Brick Books

      Box 20081

      431 Boler Road

      London, Ontario

      N6K 4G6

      Canada

      www.brickbooks.ca

      For my family,

      my first order

      Contents

      Density

      Angle

      Syncline, Anticline

      Contributions to Geometry: the Snake

      Philosophy Is Going Uphill

      Contributions to Geometry: the Gulf Stream

      Leaving for Toronto

      Pairing

      Pattern: Four Sides

      Contributions to Geometry: Cold Hands

      Cryo

      The Meteorology

      A Body of Too Many Spines

      Contributions to Geometry: Lichen

      Join or Connect in the Carpenter’s Sense

      Hour

      Precambrian

      Cambrian

      Palaeozoic

      Carboniferous

      Upper Pleistocene

      The Egg as Immigrant

      A Chemical History

      Time My Lips, My Blue Hands

      For the Structures, I Miss You

      Mnemonic

      Good

      The Good

      The Unreflective, the Inland Fish

      Father Demetrius’s Bees

      Kingdom, Phylum, Class

      ∞

      Practice

      The Dumb Anonymity

      The Good

      Islands Hesitate at the Mouth of a Bay

      The Humours

      Vespers

      Eclipse

      Great Chain of Being

      Notes

      Acknowledgments

      Biography

      Some people dismiss taxonomies and their revisions as mere exercises in abstract ordering—a kind of glorified stamp collecting….No view could be more false and more inappropriately arrogant. Taxonomies are reflections of human thought; they express our most fundamental concepts about the objects of our universe. Each taxonomy is a theory about the creatures that it classifies.

      — Stephen Jay Gould

      This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our world….Genuine contemplation never lasts long; the natural being that only now revealed itself to me in the mystery of reciprocity has again become describable, analyzable, classifiable…

      — Martin Buber

      Density

      All things desire

      to be as close as possible.

      So planets form as spheres.

      So the lost walk in circles.

      Smoke leaves a fire clinging to the faces of those who stand over it, curling

      in the anxious arcs of changing state.

      The table is set in

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