UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO LINKS
"I read Fire and Brimstone with great pleasure. I especially liked the
quick apt metaphors catching a situation or a mood exactly, the
domestication of the vastly theological and mystic, the combination of dark
wit and child's-eye renderings of experience."
- Don McKay
"Steeped in both the spiritual and the sensual, Dempster's poems delight
with their fiery, original images. From a trapped bird to an orchid to the
end of the world, he finds the spiritual secret in everything. You will be
left breathless by the astonishing string of insights that fill this book.
Be prepared to be challenged, but best of all, be prepared to be moved poem
after poem."
- Robert Hilles, on Fire and Brimstone
"Barry Dempster uses his precise command of metaphysical turns of phrase and
vivid imagery to explore the nature of belief in the twentieth century,
whether he turns his attentions to the iconoclasm of D.H. Lawrence or to the
hypocracies and naivete of suburban religious fundamentalism. In the
process, he articulates a human-scale cosmology well outside the
church-going conventions of the mainstream. For Dempster it is the life
force itself -- in its unconditional inclusiveness -- that is the Divine,
and the joyous mystery."
- John Barton
Barry Dempster's works copyright © to the author.