Christopher Dewdney – författare

Christopher Dewdney’s love for the landscape and the flora and fauna of southwestern Ontario has provoked some of the most gorgeously erotic prose ever to appear in this country. From that love, augmented by ardent research in the field, emerges a marvellously compelling, futuristic vision of time and space collapsed into near-simultaneity. Books IV and V of The Natural History of Southwestern Ontario, presented in Signal Fires, are self-contained sections of a continuing prose poem deeply satisfying in its density. The New-Old World of this long poem, written over a fifteen-year period, is sensuously and conceptually so immediate that orgasm and epiphany are one in it. This is writing, and reading, as immersion. Accompanying the natural histories in Signal Fires are poems with a different but equally involving music, lyrics of loss and redemption in which human relationships are central.From the Trade Paperback edition.

A Governor General’s Award – nominated poetry collection from a prize-winning poet and essayist. Christopher Dewdney uses the vocabulary of paleontology, biology, and physics in poems that meditate on life in southwestern Ontario.

Weaving together science and storytelling, art and anthropology, Dewdney takes readers on a fascinating journey through the nocturnal realm. In twelve chapters corresponding to the twelve hours of night, he illuminates night''s central themes, including sunsets, nocturnal animals, bedtime stories, festivals of the night, fireworks, astronomy, nightclubs, sleep and dreams, the graveyard shift, the art of darkness, and endless nights. With infectious curiosity, a lyrical, intimate tone, and an eye for nighttime beauties both natural and man-made, Christopher Dewdney paints a captivating portrait of our hours in darkness. Christopher Dewdney is the author of three books of nonfiction-Last Flesh, The Secular Grail, and The Immaculate Perception-as well as eleven books of poetry. A three-time nominee for Governor General''s Awards and a first-prize winner of the CBC Literary Competition, Dewdney lives in Toronto, Ontario. "As you read these pages, your life will change, because the way you see half of it will change. The night we''re all familiar with will emerge as a fresh thing, deeper, fuller, older, younger, more evocative, more intimate, larger, more spectacular and, yes, more magical, and much more thrilling."-Margaret Atwood, Globe and Mail "[A] felicitous literary gambol from dusk till dawn...Dewdney throws himself headlong into the deep pool of his subject."-Sue Halpern, Newsday "An enjoyable and instructive read."-Sven Birkerts, Boston Globe Also available: HC 1-58234-396-9 $24.95

A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario has been published serially since the late seventies and was collected in book form for the first time last year by ECW Press; the time, now, has come for the emergence of an audio version. Created by Steve Venright, this two-and-a-half-hour-long sonic interpretation consists of over five hundred original recordings, made at locations specific to the text and woven into a reading of the entire four-book poem by the author. Venright takes Dewdney's masterpiece to a new realm of experience to create one of the most ambitious soundscapes ever made, a hyperlucid, sometimes hallucinatory exploration that spans several geological eras of the geography and countless creatures of Southwestern Ontario. Primal, erotic, cerebral and exalted, A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario will envelop you in the visionary landscape of Canada's most adventurous poet.