Jeramy Dodds lives in Orono, Ontario. His poems have been translated into Finnish, French, Latvian, Swedish, German and Icelandic. In 2007 he held a residency at the Baltic Centre for Writers and Translators on the island of Gotland, Sweden. He is the winner of the 2006 Bronwen Wallace Memorial Award and the 2007 CBC Literary Award in poetry. He works as a research archaeologist and co-edits for littlefishcartpress.
Judges’ Citation
A research archaeologist by training, Dodds is sounding the deeps here. A marvellous debut.
We are only allowed to live/due to some colossal misunderstanding’ writes Jeramy Dodds in this astonishing first book. The exploration of this misunderstanding is the subject of Crabwise to the Hounds, and Dodds’ language confronts the entropy with some wondrous chaos of its own. There is a cyclonic lexical energy here, deep intelligence, and a serious commitment to craft. His poems build and infold all at once, and opposing forces create incredible tension in them: the reader’s mouth, open in awe, next barks a disbelieving laugh. There’s more than a little of Buster Keaton here, threading his body through a window in a falling wall: simple marvels that stop you in your own tracks when you begin to think about how they were done. The author seems sui generis at first, but then you sense how lightly he’s stepped through the bramble of various inheritances to find his own voice, and on the first try. In ‘Making Sure’, for instance, Dodds harnesses both Tim Lilburn and William Stafford at the same moment as he’s claiming a certain territory for his own now: the natural world occupied by an ineluctable machinery. He builds against it this machine of language in which Glenn Gould negotiates the Danube, Ho Chi Min has gone to ‘repair/the night through a colander of stars’, the aviary has a recovery wing, and even the act of sipping water is reinvented: ‘In stride with the clock’s/ hypnotics, his throat chops a glass of water/down’. A research archaeologist by training, Dodds is sounding the deeps here. A marvellous debut.
Selected poems
by Jeramy Dodds
North of lumberless land,
we made the animals fight for us.
Sore warped beasts pinched off
the rag-and-bone rack, ones that
bit by barbed bit were forced to
fisticuffs in the scrub slump of hills.
With a hairline rapture these animals
came and went about our days,
leaving their young to defend
the palaces they were forced from
for us. These carousel mammals walked
skewered to the pole. With forepaws
in kid gloves they pricked ears when
tinder sticks lapped the brass-green
kettledrums, drums that laid down the miles
to their relevant demise.
After rock-picking, the fields
were pocked. My uncle with a hazel switch
kicking his mule’s hide. My uncle
after twenty more one-mores, his
hat-hidden forehead facing hindsight
as he ox-eyed the ten-ton dewline
that girdled the drumlins. His
cat-o’-nine-tailed spine
humped along the timber-slab paths,
his blinkered mule craning at the headlands;
his pelt hides bone anchor points, marrow levers,
sanguine pulleys. An oilcloth dropped
on his doily-thin, God-given name.
And that’s our house, dog-eared
by a balepick hooked in the gatepost
like a tongue licked on winter tin. From
a Caesarean cloudbelly, grey hounds of rain
tear messenger pigeons down to half-tilled fallow.
From the crown of the fox tower I pull my scope
from its rat-hide case, come in close on Uncle,
that mule under his loins scraping home
in ankle drags. The gully was as far as I got
by eye. The rest I only heard,
the noise I’m writing to forget
as the barren hounds got onto him.
Copyright © Jeramy Dodds, 2008
Crown Land
It was the year I subscribed to an absurd
amount of magazines, there were lions everywhere.
Lions at the tambourines, lions in the gate house, lions
up the sleeve of your bible black dress, you could set your watch
by the screams, the shimmy-shackle of claws
on the hardwood floor wore down your ears, ghosts
of lions fathered our kids, lions of the long grass,
Barnum & Bailey types, we knelt at the scimitar scar
on the tamer’s breast as valets brought lions upon lions,
lions going at us with the violence of a clearance sale, my wife
comes home with a lion between her legs, antelope musk
hog-tied in her mouth, bed-lamp bright wounds,
a yoke of tear-jars tingling from her nicked shoulders,
lions cornered in her cranium, the wedding dancers slain,
their scattered organs like gobs of fruit, lions
at the chink in our amour, lions on the owls, lions
like labs, the house pets snapped, lions loaded for bear,
lions at the crypt ledger jotting down kills,
plaster casts of claws above our cancer ward doors, lions
past the curtains of our ribs, pant like whistling arrows,
starved lions, hair painted on their bones,
lions in the yard with kids, lions
at the midnight fridge, chicken on their lips,
lions at the watering hole bullying
for beer money, lions mowing through
the Foot Guard, Beefeaters, Dragoons,
standing in perfect pecking order
at my bedside, waiting for me to snap
the bones of my watch onto my wrist and dress
in their gift of slipper-thin armour.
Copyright © Jeramy Dodds, 2008
Lions of the Work Week
Deer, a jackrabbit the size of a motorcycle.
– Tim Lilburn
Hit quick, the road-wasted stag
fell like the sick sorrel horse
we hunted by syringe
in a 3 x 5 pen. His fallen
figure-skater sprawl
drew out our awe, lying
on his own canvas of blood,
iron tailings from a ran-down mill.
Overcoated men with leather bags
of tinctures and bitters
couldn’t bring him around.
Witnesses stood, arms crossed,
afraid their hands might reach
for the debris of muscle guyropes
knifed by the blunt bumper of an SUV.
Looking aside I saw
a young woman come out
of the woods and work
her way through the crowd,
coming to rest in a kneel
at the buck’s breast.
We moved to halt her
but she heeled us with one hand
while the other slid to his snapped
sapling crown. She rubbed her fingers
gently down his brow, grappling his snout
to bring his half-yard of neck right round.
Copyright © Jeramy Dodds, 2008