Demon Pond

Chris Knight is a copy editor at Canadian Press.

Christopher Dewdney writes like a time-traveling poet who’s just
fallen in love. Strangely devoid of place, his dreamlike language
resonates with wind and weather, pushing clouds and time with equal
ferocity. In his work, winds are “like an army, leaving marauding
gusts to roam the summer landscape in loose formations. Each one a
billowing, constantly involuting entity that surged and ebbed, swooping
from invisible quarters of the sky.” And everything is “a sieve to
time’s particulate and invisible touch.” In 44 sparse yet richly
decorated pieces of free verse and prose poetry, he conjures up wind
storms and entire worlds such as M95ED, which is “identical to our
world, only you were never born.”

But there is much more than meteorological and astrophysical musings
here. Dewdney uses time, dreams, and cloudscapes to reflect on our
feelings and humanity. In “The Clouds,” unmoving masses of airborne
moisture lead the speaker to conclude that “[w]e are thinking
clouds,” while in “Hollow Wind, Empty Stars” he contrasts “the
wind, supernatural, / like an abandoned votive ornament” with “we
who look on, / who merely regret, have / never loved nor thought / nor
moved.” Ultimately, these poems are very much like dreams. There is an
internal logic that makes sense from within the poem but cannot quite be
recaptured, although the images will keep returning to the reader, as in
“The Birch Leaves,” in which “you turn and look to see yourself
turning and looking at someone turning and looking at yourself turning
and looking at yourself.”