Cyril Dabydeen “stakes claim to legendary status,” says New York-based literary critic Dr. Glenville Ashby in a Caribbean book review about “God’s Spider,” the eighth collection by the Guyana-born Canadian writer and former Poet Laureate of Ottawa. It follows on previous books by Dabydeen such as “Uncharted Heart” (Borealis Press) and “Imaginary Origins: Selected Poems” (Peepal Tree Press).
Dabydeen was invited by the Congress of Humanities and Social Sciences at its last assembly at the University of Ottawa to read from his new collection to an audience of international scholars. In “God’s Spider,” Dabydeen draws from a storehouse of rich imagery as he “makes enlightening connections between ancient Greece and Amerindian myth in Guyana, and present tropes of the buried voices of the past,” the book’s blurb notes.
