Permugenesis

Permugenesis, a book-length prose poem from Christopher Dewdney, follows The Cenozoic Asylum and Spring Trances in the Control Emerald Night in his series “A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario". As a product of post-modern aesthetics, Permugenesis is a permutation of order and meaning, working through and beyond the elements of Cenozoic Asylum and Spring Trances.

Through the elisions and evocations of meaning, the merging of the primordial and the techno-scientific, the very process of language itself is revealed, as revelation, as magic. Images, flowing from sound to meaning, are transformed by a word, a phrase, where “Here at the panavistic surface lips are drawn over teeth, a shadow moving through the words being formed. “ This alien landscape is revealed as our own, on the Scarborough Bluffs, or over Dundas. Yet it is foreign, fantastic, and at times shockingly beautiful. “There is a long descent to the river which is a rumour written in smoke.” Or “Infra-red snakes sway in a phantasmatic waveform.” This dislocation of language, this destruction and recreation of meaning propels the text and the reader to the limits of language, to the images of contradiction; the process of signification is unmasked and the “Air thick with allusion.” Lurking beneath / between the words is the violence of the text, the subtle paranoia which pervades much of Dewdney’s previous work. The Other is forever feminine, the haunting past / future of this body / text. “She is fair, she is dark with moonlit fields unearthly children under soles up into tension amber of your eternal existence in sunlit replicas of herself. The stars are perhaps mistakes swarming through the canopy of the broken consort, their branches a nocturnal heat storm.” Foreign, fantastic, and altogether alien, the body becomes the landscape as meaning slips, transforming vision.

Permugenesis glances back to Dewdney’s previous works, to the task of mapping the boundaries of language and thereby going beyond them. Dewdney’s universe of sentinel trees, of asphalt and Ordovician streams is unsettling; time and space are merely referents, or merely adjectives. But his investigation is worth discovering.