Lifted from an ancient Chinese astronomical text, the title Dream Pool Essays hints at Gil McElroy’s interest in cosmology: always a construct made visible between the elements of chaos.
These poems constitute an active multiple streaming of sources usually considered quite disparate: the physical sciences, particularly astronomy, theoretical cosmology, and quantum physics; the literary arts insofar as they are concerned with re-imagining the world—the imago mundi of Charles Olson, the transformations of Jack Spicer, the incantations of Robert Duncan, the deconstructions of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets like Ron Silliman, Clark Coolidge and Bob Perelman; and, as a crossover into McElroy’s participation in the visual arts, the great cosmic draftsman, William Blake.
The overriding imperative of these poems is the priority they afford the constructive act of reading. They are there as occasions for reading, and are incomplete, signifying nothing, and are without meaning outside the presence and active engagement of their reader(s). Just as in quantum mechanics, in which all things exist merely as potentialities which achieve their presence, their “being in the world” only through their interaction with an observer or observers, these poems are catalytic fragments in the presence of which the reader constantly re-imagines the world and its processes.
Each of these poems is an astonishment of form which perpetually lies in wait to be awakened by the reader: “I am in a light I can never be out of.”

Born in Metz, France, poet Gil McElroy grew up on air force bases in Canada and the United States. He studied English Literature at Queen’s University in Ontario. His poems and other works have been published in countless periodicals throughout North America since the late 1970s; issued in a number of self-published chapbooks, broadsheets, and one-of-a-kind book works; and anthologized in Groundswell: best of above/ground press, 1993–2003 (Broken Jaw Press, 2003), Side/Lines: A New Canadian Poetics (Insomniac Press, 2003), and Written in the Skin (Insomniac Press, 1999). He currently lives in Colborne, Ontario with his wife Heather.

McElroy has also been an independent curator and freelance art critic for 20 years, organizing exhibitions for public art galleries and museums in Canada and writing art criticism for magazines in Canada, the United States and Australia. A selection of his catalogue essays and reviews was published as Gravity & Grace: Selected Writing on Contemporary Canadian Art (Gaspereau Press, 2001) and in the anthology CRAFT Perception and Practice: A Canadian Discourse (Ronsdale Press, 2002). His show ST. ART: The Visual Poetry of bpNichol pays tribute to one of the great poets of the twentieth century. Originally mounted at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery & Museum in Charlottetown, P.E.I. in May through October, 2000, it later moved to the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia before touring the country throughout 2001. McElroy’s curatorial essay accompanying the exhibition also won the Christina Sabat Award for Critical Writing in the Arts.

Gil McElroy's profile page

• Short-listed, Gerald Lampert Memorial Award

“The expected subjects of faith, work, nature, solitude and writing itself are represented with clarity and beauty.” — Canadian Literature