The Breath That Lightens the Body

About the Author

Deirdre Dwyer has published poetry in numerous literary magazines across Canada, including The New Quarterly, McGill Street Magazine, Arc, Canadian Literature, Fireweed, Room of One's Own, Dalhousie Review, TickleAce, Windsor Review and others. Born in Nova Scotia in 1958, Dwyer has been writing poetry since her teacher taught her haiku in grade six. She has a B.A. from Dalhousie University where she studied Philosophy, and a M.A. in English and Creative Writing from the University of Windsor. She's worked as a bookseller, an instructor of English in Windsor, Ontario, a Second Language teacher in Tokyo, Japan, and a Creative Writing instructor in Halifax. Now a tutor at the Nova Scotia College of Art and Design, she spends her time in Halifax and in Musquodoboit Harbour, where she and her husband, Hans, are slowly finishing the interior of their house by the water. Following in the footsteps of Karen Connolly and Steven Heighton, Halifax native Deirdre Dwyer roams the Mediterranean and South East Asian terrain of Japan, Hong Kong, Thailand, India, Turkey, Greece and Spain as a foreigner voyeur, at once nomadic and in exile, breathing in the sights and sounds of the exotic lands that rise up to greet her. The Breath that Lightens the Body is a beautiful chronicle of a sojourn to worlds translated from strange brushstrokes of landscape and gesture into the shared language of sight and sound. Here too is a traveller in the process of translating herself so that divergent cultures form a language not broken but braided. These poems are as much about the "eye" as the "I" and the levelling of a gaze which casts itself upon wind, water, light, mountain and the sun-drenched faces of all those with whom she shares the path. In an attempt to capture the harmony and balance of eastern mythology and the quiet spirit that infuses mind and body, the poet inhales a deep breath that also lightens this body of verse, a refreshing human breeze that carries with it a myriad of rich and pungent memories. On the final page the traveller exhales an altered self, happy to occupy the body that is home, returning to Canada re-turned.