Invisible Dogs

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't—not 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.
Miles of missing her, those erratic white lines.
He keeps forgetting where he's going—city,
corner store, centre of the universe. No wonder
arrival feels so temporary, like a borrowed bathroom key."
—from "He Said/She Said"