Born in Amazonia

John Walker is a professor of Spanish studies at Queen’s University.

Like all good poetry, this slim collection of verse uses the particular
to arrive at the universal. The jaguar serves as a metaphor not only of
the Amazon region but also of the dark and obscure underworld of memory
and consciousness, myth and magic. In Dabydeen’s multifaceted poems,
dualities—past and present, dream and nightmare, life and death,
civilization and barbarism— are fused. The animal world is represented
by the jaguar, the chameleon, the alligator, and the crocodile, the
modern world by Crocodile Dundee and the Bramalea City Centre. The world
of history and myth (Raleigh and Drake/El Dorado) is linked to the
ecological, social, and political problems of Amazonian Indians and
Bolivian miners caught up in a Darwinian struggle for survival. The
evolving mythologies captured in these poems will leave a deep
impression on modern imaginations.