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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.
Christopher Dewdney has served as writer-in-residence at Trent, Western, and York universities. Featured in Ron Mann’s film Poetry in Motion with William Burroughs, Allen Ginsberg, Michael Ondaatje, and Tom Waits, Dewdney has presented his groundbreaking poetics across North America and Europe. He also creates acoustic and visual art, along with incisive arts commentary for print.
| Karl E. Jirgens, head of the Department of English at the University of Windsor, has taught at the universities of Toronto, York, Guelph, and Laurentian. Since 1979, he has served as editor-in-chief of Rampike, a critically acclaimed international journal of art and writing. Jirgens’s fiction, performance works, poetry, and scholarly articles are published worldwide.
Table of Contents for
Children of the Outer Dark: The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney, selected with an introduction by Karl E. Jirgens
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