Christopher Dewdney's achievement in poetry has deep roots in London, Ontario, where he was born and raised and where he was educated in more ways than one. He attended local public and high schools and the Beal Art Annex, but he seems to have absorbed more from two other sources: his family, especially his father, and from the physical environment of his youth, particularly The Coves--an oxbow lake in a deep ravine that borders Erie Avenue where the Dewdneys lived.

Dewdney's father, Selwyn Dewdney, was a novelist and ethno-archaeologist well known for his work on Indian pictographs and the birch-bark scroll legends of the Ojibway. His mother, Irene Donner Dewdney, is an art therapist. Alexander, one of two older brothers, teaches computer science at the University of Western Ontario, writes a column on computers for Scientific American, and is author of The Planiverse (1984), a novel about two-dimensional beings...