Invisible Dogs

A note to US-based customers: All Lit Up is pausing print orders to the USA until further notice. Read more

Virtuosic poems tracking two intertwined themes: the breakdown of an obsessive love affair and the vicissitudes of middle age.

Invisible Dogs, Dempster’s fourteenth collection, is a complex but deeply coherent hymn to the difficult business of staying alive. This is a book for when it hurts so bad you hope you’ll die and are afraid you won’tÑnot because it offers consolation or the promise of a new dawn, but because it so compellingly documents the plain, hard, ungraceful, stumbling grief of the matter, and meets it with rare self-knowledge, wry humour, and an unornamented determination to go on living.

Dempster’s metaphors are like hairpin turns taken at breakneck speed. He has nerves of steel when it comes to self-examination, and it’s this relentless honesty and the emotional torque it induces that keep the voice on the road.
… He scrutinizes
the rearview mirror as if it were a bush about to spring
into flames, the past appearing closer than it really is.ÊÊ
Miles of missing her, those erratic white lines.ÊÊ
He keeps forgetting where he’s going Ð city,
corner store, centre of the universe. No wonder
arrival feels so temporary, like a borrowed bathroom key.
~ from “He Said/She Said”

AUTHOR

Barry Dempster

Barry Dempster was born in Toronto, Ontario, and educated in child psychology. He is the author of a novel, children’s literature and over a dozen collections of poetry. His work has been nominated for the Governor General’s Award twice and won the Canadian Authors Association Chalmers Award for poetry. From 1990 to 1997, he was the Poetry and Reviews Editor for Poetry Canada. He is currently the senior editor with Brick Books. He has been on the faculty at The Banff Centre as mentor for the Writing Studio, Wired Writing and Writing with Style programs, has conducted two master classes and has been the Writer-in-Residence at the Richmond Hill Public Library twice.

Reviews

“This writing is full of density and weight, despite the apparent simplicity, and reads very well aloud … [A] mastercraftsman at the height of his powers.” — Philip K. Thompson, Halifax Chronicle-Herald

“[T]he truly arresting aspect of these poems is their intensity of feeling and the poet’s respect for feeling.” — Candice Fertile, The Maple Tree Literary Supplement

“Barry Dempster’s books seem–at first read–to take in all there is in the world, but each subsequent reading focusses the reader to a sharper point, a familiar word made unfamiliar, a tiny moment, which may seem insignificant within the larger text, but when fully heard, rings as true and clear …” — Kimmy Beach, CV2