I’ve never been one of those readers who takes note of new words and then finds a way to fold them into the next day’s conversation. However, I did keep track of a few of the spellcheck-defying entries in Christopher Dewdney’s Signal Fires. Dewdney’s work is famously suffused with the arcane and musical language of biology and botany and geoscience, and this latest collection of poems is no exception. Ammonoid, pyritized, gracile, osmoderma, cecropias, lycopod, cartilaginous, mammatocumulus: these are representative cullings from the first few pages. If this man suggests Scrabble, remember that you have to wash your hair.

A good short primer for Dewdney’s work is his introduction to Predators of the Adoration: Selected Poems, 1972–1982. He writes about his lifelong fascination – encouraged by his archeologist father – with the fossil-riddled limestone, forested ravines, and wildlife of southwestern Ontario. He calls those poems “a codex of the plants and animals whose technology is truly miraculous, and for whom I am merely a scribe.” Judging by this new book, it’s a torch he hasn’t let fall. There is no one in this country, with the possible exception of Anne Michaels, who has so persuasively chipped away at a rock face to reveal the poetry striated just beneath the surface.

Signal Fires is bookended by two long and complex sequences of poems, Books III and IV of “A Natural History of Southwestern Ontario.” Dewdney doesn’t take a painterly, leisurely look at the natural world, but renders it with both jaw and brain, recording a series of seasonal observations, field notes made in a deliciously fructifying, sexualized landscape. They are love poems, really, as are the half-dozen shorter and more immediately accessible pieces that complete the book – energetic celebrations of carnal love, love of land and spiralling stars, love of time in its passing, love even of the banal cities that are a lurking presence at nature’s edge.

Lepidodendron, chinquapin, onthophagus, stroboscopic: these intelligent, uncompromising, sensual poems are not for the rapid reader, but anyone who lingers with them a while will be amply repaid. “There is a language to predicate the adoration,” writes Dewdney, and that language lives in his every line.