If the author hadn't categorized his own work as "poetry" I wd've been tempted to create a new "shelf" for him. Perhaps "fossil memory" wd do for this one. I was surprised to open this & find that he'd signed it for me: "inclusive pithdong". I imagine that latter word was meant as a pun off of "dipthong" (aka "gliding vowel"). Dunno, but I like the word combinations. I think he might've written it b/c he combined the "a" & "e", dipthong style, in his writing of the name of mine that the bk was signed to. It's been so long since I've seen anything by him that I just looked him up online & was happy to find that he's still alive & has plenty of new bks for me to read.

This one is published by Toronto's The Coach House Press who, as usual, do a beautiful job. It might be Dewdney's 1st bk. The cover is subtle & almost gives the appearance of an actual geological survey. Dewdney's collages are vaguely reminiscent of Max Ernst's. They combine fossil images & technical illustrations & the like - much in the same way the language does. What I like the most about this writing is the way it's like a manual for a poetic analysis of the history of the (meta)physical environment. Take this paragraph:

"Some things are not accounted for. The transitional nature of the memory jackets allow them to become imprinted with the dreams of isolated individuals even hundreds of miles away. The concretion responds to the charge induced in the memory jacket by the dream utilizing the electro-static properties of the red oil lens. The concretion moves slowly, aligning itself, and begins arbitrarily to transmit previously recorded dreams mutated over the years by stellar and meteoric interference. One dream thusly created attained an independent consciousness and began to feed from the sleeping minds of human beings. It could telepathically transmit hallucinations and was protected by a field of deja vue." ( )