Search results for ""Author Cyril Dabydeen""

What is 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. 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. Poems investigate journeyings and borders that connect to the adventure of engaging with the otherness of encountered people. Poems celebrate identities that can never be other than as multi-layered as the places that shaped them. Cyril Dabydeen 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. In these conversations with the reader, the poems make enlightening connections between ancient Greece and Amerindian myth in Guyana; the present and the buried voices of the past. In paying homage to the great Guyanese writer Wilson Harris, Cyril Dabydeen signals that he too is a rejector of absolutes, in search of multiple possibilities.

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Cyril Dabydeen brings a poet's vision to these stories which span the crossing between the Caribbean and North America. They have a surface of gritty realism, but move inwards to explore the hidden dreams and latent capacities of his characters. Whether in the unsettling landscapes of rural Berbice in Guyana (with its ferocious crocodiles and even a spliff-toting Rasta), the wilderness of the Canadian North, or the urban melting pot of Toronto, Dabydeen's characters are memorably alert to what makes them feel either at home or alien in their various landscapes. Ranging from the extremely funny to the tragic, these stories are full of poetry, tension and sometimes terror. Cyril Dabydeen involves the reader creatively in a world of shifting grounds.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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Cyril Dabydeen's poems deal with the experience of living within two cultures, a present of the cool landscapes and growing security of Canada, and a past of tropical poverty and disorder experienced in the Corentyne district of Guyana. Yet even as the poems record a growing immersion in the textures of Canadian life, memories of Guyana surface with stubborn persistence, feeding his complex sensibility. What he achieves is a vision of the interpenetration of the two landscapes, a doubleness of seeing which is richly rewarding."Dabydeen grew up in Guyana and his ability to speak from both Caribbean and Canadian contexts gives much of his work its power. He's at his best here in his expansive voice - an exciting collection." Bronwen Wallace"The poet displays a narrative gift that seems to root his poetry securely in the actual rather than the abstract - the poetry achieves a complexity of tone and attitude."Jeffrey RobinsonCyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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A few years ago, Kamau Brathwaite described Cyril Dabydeen as 'one of the most confident and accomplished voices in the Caribbean diaspora this side of the late 20th century. Now in the 21st century there is the opportunity to savour the growth and achievement of over thirty years. From his first Canadian publications, Goatsong, Distances, This Planet Earth, Heart's Frame and Elephants Make Good Stepladders from the 1970s and early 80s, to his Canadian publications of the 1990s, Stoning the Wind and Born in Amazonia, not forgetting his two Peepal Tree publications, Islands Lovelier than a Vision and Discussing Columbus, Cyril Dabydeen has selected those poems that best represent the journey he has made across multiple boundaries. From his roots as an Asian whose grandparents migrated as indentured labourers from 19th century India, from his shaping as a Guyanese growing up during a period of intense national ferment, and his life as an adult in Canada, Cyril Dabydeen has shaped a vision that makes an enlightening virtue of heterogeneity. Not merely a Guyanese exile, but a writer who has immersed himself in the landscapes, history and lived experience of Canada (and without losing the insistent promptings of Guyanese memory and concern), Dabydeen's poetry shows the rich possibilities inherent in combining immigrant and diasporic selves. His work ranges across the confessional, the narrative and the mythic but always with an unwavering integrity in seeking the interior truth of the poem. He writes with a conversational directness, a clarity born of careful craft, but with an obliqueness of angle and density of image that constantly shifts the reader into new and rewarding frames of reference.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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When Columbus arrived in the Caribbean in 1492, he believed that he had landed on the coast of India. Cyril Dabydeen's ancestors came from India to the Caribbean in the nineteenth century as indentured labourers. This is an irony which appeals to him, an 'illustration of an odd and idiosyncratic destiny at work'. Since then, like many of his fellow Guyanese, Cyril Dabydeen has moved on again to settle in Canada. This collection of poems grows out of a consciousness of a world made up of layers of journeyings and settlement, of the meeting of heterogeneous cultures and the results of their mingling. On 'a deserted but peopled land', Dabydeen explores experiences of Canada and the Caribbean which simultaneously speak of a past of brutal genocide and tyranny and a world of recreating newness, constantly awaiting rediscovery, constantly evolving from the convergencies which that voyage of 1492 began.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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When a European naturalist arrives in a remote South American village, how are the villagers to respond to his promise to remove the monstrous massacouraman from the creek? Is he a saviour freeing them from its danger, or is he threatening to take away something which is uniquely theirs for display in an American or European zoo? Folk belief confronts rationalistic science in this poetic fable which sees events through both European and village eyes.Set in the remote Canje region, the villagers in Dark Swirl feel that they have only the most vestigial remnants of their original Hindu world view. They have, indeed, absorbed much of the local mix of Amerindian/African folk beliefs - in the existence of the legendary massacouraman, for instance. What they still have, though, is a residual Hindu view of the interconnectedness of all living things, though in their state of rootlessness this sometimes expresses itself in feelings of mutual hostility and unwarranted cruelty.Dreams are the interconnecting territory between the myth of the massacouraman and the innermost fantasies and intuitions of the villagers that relate to their fears concerning their loss of authenticity and their unbelonging. And it is in a dreamlike state induced by sickness, where he can no longer disentangle what is real from what is in his imagination, that the 'divided selves' of the European stranger begin speaking to him as: 'twin messengers with contrary tales'. In the process his whole structure of thought is profoundly altered."Massacouraman is a formidable Guyanese folk legend... Dark Swirl seeks to plumb its pertinence to all factions, groups, races, insiders, outsiders. The novel seeks to evoke an inner region lying somewhere between the science of the stranger and the fantasies and visions of the village folk. Before they part company they appear to see through interchangeable eyes into the mysteries of a nature in a long state of eclipse..."Wilson HarrisCyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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When Devan, the awkward boy from Providence Village, finds his vocation as a teacher of Hinduism to the rural Indians of the Corentyne Coast of Guyana, his life and his troubles begin. In this richly comic novel, Cyril Dabydeen creates a vibrant picture of the Guyanese Hindu community struggling for a place in what is for Devan a confusingly multi-racial country. When Devan leaves his village and his wife and children behind, he finds urban, cosmopolitan Georgetown, with its wealthy and politically cynical Indian elite, an experience frequently at odds with the ardent simplicities of his teaching. In the tragi-comic absurdities of Devan's career, Dabydeen reveals powerfully the dangers to a religion's truths when it is made to serve the needs of ethnic assertion. But in becoming the Wizard Swami in charge of Mr Bhairam's prize racehorse Destiny, Devan not only reaches his lowest point, but also begins to discover truths of a much more tentative but enlightening kind. The Wizard Swami is a finely observed comedy of manners, but it is much more than that in its imaginative and poetic play with the symbols of Hinduism in a secular and cosmopolitan society.Cyril Dabydeen was born in Guyana in 1945. He migrated to Canada in 1970. He is the author of almost a dozen collections of poetry, two novels and six collections of short stories.

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