Poems by Metazoan

Poems by Metazoan was the first poetry book JMD published back when he was 26. The original 200 handcrafted books were mostly given away to anyone who would take them. The original cover art created by the microcosmic artist and photographer Kirsty Diane Graham is now featured on the last page of the ebook. The reprint farmed out to Seowan University in South Korea while living and working there. The ebook features the exact same Korean-made cover. The font and format have remained virtually unchanged from the original handcrafted books and throughout the reprints. However, it would be a shame not to take advantage of a more technological table of contents.

The selected poems were written over a period of five years beginning with his final year at the austere Maori boys, Catholic boarding school Hato Paora College as a disaffected 18 year old, and culminating in privileged attendance to the prestigious workshop of Burns Fellow John Dolan at Otago University in 2000. Dolan compared Dunn to Blake remarking that few could pull it off, but Dunn had nicely done so.

His first ever poem penned at 13 won him freedom from the boarding school grounds for a nerve-racking evening of recital at the Manawatu Art Gallery, not to mention second placing and $50 cash which would fetch a decent feed for the ravenous team. It would be the start of a career more and more defined by minimalist expressions of haunted disenchantment questing for those legendary molecules of hope. Poems by Metazoan projects that searching variety of inner life despite the grubby film of reality. Its poems decry industry without conscience, phrasing the personal struggle as macrocosmic and vice versa. Its metaphors are abstract, concretising the impossible; the chimera of poet and society, of culture and nature, of mundanity and divinity, of nightmare and industry. The poems are very personal paroxysms. They capture the exquisite horrors of a waking life that, when it comes to the weight of the world, cannot yet shrug.