Children of the Outer Dark

The Poetry of Christopher Dewdney

Christopher Dewdney, Karl E. Jirgens

• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Year: 2007
• eBook ISBN:
  9781554581023
• Topic: Literatura
• Subtopic: Biografías literarias

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.

Table of contents

• Table of Contents
• Foreword
• Biographical Note
• Introduction
• 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
• Bibliography
• Glossary