Alter sublime

by Christopher Dewdney

97 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1980

About the author

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.

Reviews

[Ken Hunt]

Dewdney is a poet's poet. His earlier works showcase a brutal subtlety, a quiet way of explaining what he thinks and feels that neither demands nor requires an immediately-complete acceptance or total absorption of the imagery presented. Dewdney's are the quintessential "you have to read it multiple times to really get it" kind of poems, but in the best sense of that somewhat cliche perspective. Dewdney's work lends itself to readings spaced far apart, as if the poems expect to act as witnesses to expanses of time that leave the reader transformed by experience. Many other poems and poets write work that expects this kind of re-visiting, but Dewdney's work in particular traffics in a kind of prescience that feels more eerie the more you re-visit the poems. Dewdney positions the reader as a geologist of language, both promising and providing to them the fruits of a Faustian bargain, wherein repeated readings only serve to bury both the explorer and their tools in the sediment of the medium.