The Star lauds 'illuminating' Crabwise to the Hounds

The Cubist artist Georges Bracque once compared poetry to light, because of its ability to rouse our imaginative engagement with the world: 'Reality reveals itself when it is illuminated by a ray of poetry. All around us is asleep.'

Seen from this metaphorical angle, Crabwise to the Hounds is akin to having your room lit up by sheet lightning.

Jeramy Dodds commented in an interview that 'the language is running the show' in Crabwise to the Hounds — and what a sensational show it is. Dodds, who lives in Orono, east of Oshawa, and works as a research archeologist, doesn't come unheralded, though this is his debut collection. He won the RBC Bronwen Wallace Award for Emerging Writers in 2006 (for the most promising writer under 35) as well as poetry honours in the CBC Literary Competition in 2007. Dodds topped all that last week, when Crabwise to the Hounds made it to the shortlist for the lucrative Griffin Poetry Prize.

Dodds's flights of surreal, often comically outlandish invention are based on an eclectic range of subjects. He plucks figures from the pages of history (the 18th century Swedish naturalist Carl Linnaeus and Ho Chi Minh, among others) and riffs on animals real and imaginary (a stag struck down by an SUV; a creature that is a cross between a rabbit and a vampire). Music is also a major part of the mix — fittingly so, since in this poet's hands language itself is a musical instrument, capable of an entertaining variety of sounds, tones and tempos.

Dodds's language has plenty of figurative flair, too. Crabwise to the Hounds teems with striking images and metaphors. In one poem, the inventor of the Heimlich manoeuvre has 'mammogram hands.' Elsewhere, a horse's skeletal remains 'lie like petrified trombones, whitened already by sunup and white-noise wind.'

Several of the collection's most dazzling poems are about Glenn Gould, a figure who has drawn his share of poetic attention, not that the pianist's life and work seem stale subjects.

Here Dodds describes Gould performing at a concert: 'His right hand on the trebles moving / at the rate it takes to stitch shut / the eyes of a hawk. // Left hand low and slow, corking / scraps of breath in a perfume bottle.'

The poem continues for another two and a half pages, toggling back and forth between vivid metaphors suggestive of the movement of Gould's hands and the music itself. This poem is itself a thrilling bit of virtuosity.