God's Spider

At the heart of Cyril Dabydeen’s poetry is an acute sense of geography as both space and time. It is a sense that begins in personal biography, of the writer born in Guyana, long settled in Canada, and conscious of his ancestral connections to India. Place frequently provides the subject matter and the metaphorical threads that run through the collection, and the poems are drawn to hinterlands and interiors both as actual places and as mental landscapes and as a metaphor for the interior life of the poem—frequently independent of the writer’s conscious intentions. He writes with lyric grace, but perhaps his most characteristic voice is conversational, often witty and amused in its sharing of experiences as diverse as the incidents of travel, cricket, and the absurd pretensions of the literary world.

Cyril Dabydeen is the author of fifteen collections of poetry, four novels, and seven collections of short stories. His poetry has been widely published in anthologies such as The Penguin Book of Caribbean Verse and Twentieth Century Canadian Poetry, and in many journals including Prairie Schooner, the Warwick Review, World Literature Today, Prism International, and Canadian Literature. He is a former poet laureate of the city of Ottawa. He lives in Ottawa, Ontario.