Cyril Dabydeen (1945- ), who hails from Guyana, has published more than a dozen books of prose and poetry in the United Kingdom and Canada, including the book of poems "This Planet Earth" (1979, Borealis), the novel "Dark Swirl" (1989), and the story collections "Jogging in Havana" (1992) and "My Brahmin Days" (2000). The Ottawa resident was the city's Poet Laureate from 1984 to 1987, and received the City of Ottawa's first Award of Excellence for Writing and Publishing in 2000.

In Uncharted Heart are poems about formed and unformed spaces rarely seen in previous work by Cyril Dabydeen. Rhythms and feelings extend boundaries to a wider more intricate world, as the poems aim for epiphanies in awakeing to mythologies by delving into the inner recesses of our beings. In this significant new collection changing tonalities are everywhere in response to geography and history, everything deriving from the many spaces working through Dabydeen´s complex imagination. Here are poems of a genuinely felt passion and honesty, the images coming to us couched in spare language as the personal voice breaks free by eschewing fancy image-making. Beliefs about destiny and journeying are spontaneously expressed, even if elegiac, but always with love and a deep understanding. Uncharted Heart confirms Dabydeen´s place as a unique voice in Canadian writing.