Kingdom, Phylum

Douglas Barbour is a professor of English at the University of Alberta.
He is the author of Lyric/anti-lyric : Essays on Contemporary Poetry,
Breath Takes, and Fragmenting Body Etc.

“Density,” the first poem in this second book by Adam Dickinson,
demonstrates just how far he has matured since Cartography and Walking,
and sets the tone for the rest of the collection. It also provides a
vision of the always eccentric taxonomies they will flirt with, offer,
and play off. Beginning “All things desire / to be as close as
possible,” it moves leisurely from the cosmological to the personal,
finding apt and startling connections that allow it to achieve a
conclusive final “So”: “So I have always loved you. I said I loved
you. / So.”

In the poems that follow, Dickinson finds a wide variety of content and
forms through which to explore a world in which that “So” can count,
despite all that would inhibit it. Prose poems, poems with extra long
lines (laid out sideways on the page), wittily acrostic poems, all of
which display scientific and scholarly understanding, reveal a poet
surely extending his powers. Given its thematic ground of taxonomy, the
poems seem to achieve a tonal coolness we associate with scientific
discourse. Yet always running under that surface is a passionate concern
for the world the poems depict with such close perception, as well as
the passion of love for both the world and the person the poems address.

Dickinson reveals a beautiful command of imagery throughout, as in this
finely discriminatory description of lichen: “Because there is no such
thing as a single beginning. / Before crowberry and fireweed, among
ruined boulders / that the ice let go, this slow committee.” His
playful approach to form in such acrostics as “Mnemonic,” where each
line contains words starting with the same letters, leads to a series of
extraordinary statements that could happen no other way. “Great Chain
of Being,” clearly a most unusual love poem, concludes the volume.

Kingdom, Phylum takes the lyric out of itself while remaining true to
its basic desires; it’s a book that announces a fine new talent has
truly arrived.