Kingdom, Phylum
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About this ebook
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.
Adam Dickinson
Adam Dickinson's poetry has appeared in literary journals and anthologies in Canada and internationally. He has published three books of poetry. His most recent book, The Polymers, was a finalist for the Governor General's Award for Poetry, the Trillium Book Award for Poetry, and the ReLit Award. His work has been translated into Chinese, Dutch, and Polish. He has been featured at international literary festivals such as Poetry International in Rotterdam, Netherlands, and the Oslo International Poetry Festival in Norway. He currently lives in St. Catherines, Ontario, where he teaches poetics and creative writing at Brock University.
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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