Kingdom, phylum

Shortlisted for the 2007 Trillium Book Award for Poetry 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.