New Releases by Don McKay

"[McKay's] exuberantly musical and shrewd poems are ecological in the fullest sense of the word: they seek to elucidate our relationships with our fragile dwelling places both on the earth and in our own skins." --New York Times Book Review E.J. Pratt Family Poetry Award, Winner An extraordinary collection of poems from Griffin Poetry Prize winner Don McKay. Old joke: “What’s the difference between a lurch and a dance step?” “I don’t know.” “I didn’t think so. Let’s sit down.” These poems are what happens when you stay out on the dance floor instead, dancing the staggers. The full moon rises from the ocean and you lurch with astonishment that we live on a rocky sphere whirling in space. Or the bird in your hand—a pipit or a storm petrel—conveys the exquisite frailty of existence. And there’s the complex of lurches as we contemplate our complicity in the sixth mass extinction. Throughout Lurch, language dances its ardent incompetence as a translator of “the profane wonders of the wilderness,” whether manifest as Balsam Fir, Catbirds, the extinct Eskimo Curlew, or the ever-present Cosmic Microwave Background. What is the difference between a love song and an elegy? We live between eroding raindrops and accelerating clocks. The piano lifts its lid to show its wire-and-hammer heart.

The sixth book of poems by Don McKay. In Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night, McKay again demonstrates his ability to transorm the familiar into the breathtaking, and to touch us deeply with words. These poems show just how much McKay can do with language. In the long title poem, readers will find themselves listening to a voice that makes them feel welcome and at home, yet as renewed as if they had slipped into new skins -- while the stand-up comedy of the madly speaking starling in "Sturnus Vulgaris" reminds us that poetry can still make readers laugh out loud. Indeed, that starling with the startling voice can be taken, says McKay, as an emblem for this book as a whole: "He argues for multiplicity and many-voicedness, for having centres everywhere."

This extraordinary book is a celebration –of the quirky plenitude of nature, and of the deep rhythms of family life. Don McKay writes with great technical panache. But his attention to what he loves is so constant and so generous that we are left, not with mere virtuosity, but with a world renewed.

From one of Canada’s most acclaimed poets and the winner of the Governor General’s Award for Poetry. This book, Don McKay’s ninth collection, practises "the dark art of reflection" – which, as one of the poems tells us, whether boldly or capriciously, could not have existed without the moon – as it moves ever more deeply into ideas of home.

“There’s a place / between desire and memory, some back porch / we can neither wish for nor recall,” writes Don McKay in Apparatus. The poems in this collection home in on that place – those keenly desired places – where language will not reach. Apparatus is Don McKay’s first collection of new poems since his 1991 award-winning Night Field. It is a passionate engagement with nature and a powerful critique of human assaults on wilderness which, for McKay, is more than unsubdued nature; it is whatever eludes the mind’s categories – the insoluble secret of life itself. To read McKay’s poems is to be in touch with the significant concerns of our time and all time. McKay is a poet of unmatched linguistic playfulness, with virtuoso flexibility of voice and an ability to shape-shift through forms, tones, and styles.

Angular unconformity: a discordant surface of contact between the deposits of two episodes of sedimentation in which the older, underlying strata have undergone folding, uplift, and erosion before the deposition of the younger sediments, so that the younger strata truncate the older. -- Michael Allaby, ed., A Dictionary of Earth Sciences, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Angular Unconformity shows us a life's work in cross-section, a restless and humane intelligence, ever searching, ever shifting, finding meaning in our blink-of-an-eye existence against a backdrop of geological time unimaginable in its scale. In this volume, the first comprehensive collection of Don McKay's poetry, this pre-eminent Canadian poet displays his gift for thinking through metaphor, channelling a profound philosophical discourse through plain language and striking imagery. In his poetry, disciplined attention and contemplation break through the commonplace and illuminate an ecological understanding of the world as it is.

Multi-award-winning poet Don McKay returns with a startling collection of new poems, his first since his Griffin Poetry Prize winning book, Strike/Slip Don McKay is known, among other things, as Canada's foremost poet of the natural world. Readers have come to expect a playful extravagance in his poetry. Most recently, he has opened himself to the mysteries of geologic wonder. "Who needs ghosts when matter /nonchalantly haunts us," he writes. In his new book, perhaps his most stunning yet, it's fossils and deep time that provide the awe. The landscape of Newfoundland has taken his linguistic virtuosity even further, sharpened his wit, and given him a lyric energy that sometimes feels as if he's lifting the planet into song.

In this extraordinary collection from one of our most celebrated poets, Don McKay walks the strike-slip fault between poetry and landscape, sticks its strange nose into the cold silence of geologic time, meditates on marble, quartz and gneiss, and attends to the songs of ravens and thrushes and to the clamour of the industrialized bush. Behind these poems lies the urge to engage the tectonics of planetary dwelling with the rickety contraption of language, and to register the stress, sheer and strain — but also the astonishment — engendered by that necessary failure.

This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay’s best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Méira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay’s afterword written especially for this volume in which McKay reflects on his own writing process—its relationship to the earth and to metamorphosis. Don McKay has published eight books of poetry. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1991 (for Night Field) and in 2000 (for Another Gravity), a National Magazine Award (1991), and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 1984 (for Birding, Or Desire). Don McKay was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize for Camber and was the Canadian winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip. Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, McKay has been active as an editor, creative writing teacher, and university instructor, as well as a poet. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of New Brunswick, The Banff Centre, The Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the BC Festival of the Arts. He has served as editor and publisher of Brick Books since 1975 and from 1991 to 1996 as editor of The Fiddlehead. He resides in British Columbia.

"In August 2006," writes Don McKay in his introduction, "a group of artists working in different media, and out of a variety of traditions, assembled in the Muskwa-Kechika wilderness of Northern British Columbia. This 'art-camp' was organized and managed by Donna Kane and Wayne Sawchuk as a way to direct aesthetic attention to an area-one of very few-in which a wild ecosystem remains virtually intact. This book is my response, presented in a form which, so I hope, fits both the region and the experience." Spreading a map of the Muskwa-Kechika out on the kitchen table prior to the trip, McKay studies the region framed by the Toad River in the north and the Tuchodi Lakes to the south. Written on the ground and in retrospect, the assemblage of poetry and prose describes encounters with the landscape and its inhabitants-lichen, caribou, moose, loons, and an unruly pack horse named Bucky. Taking up naming, ownership, wilderness, deep time-preoccupations that emerged previously in Vis à Vis and Deactivated West 100-McKay brings these notions to bear on a place almost entirely undisturbed by human settlement or industry. The Muskwa Assemblage is about settling into this lack of parameters, writing down and crossing out attempts to define that which goes on happily without definition. Interspersed with the prose are poems that capture what observation of animals in their habitat has over naming-of reducing to the shorthand of category-and similarly what wilderness retains when human habitation is not the object, where we are simply "beings among beings." This book is a smyth-sewn paperback. The text is typeset in Jenson and hand printed from photopolymer plates on Hahnemühle Biblio paper making 48 pages trimmed to 4.5 × 7 inches, bound into a paper cover and enfolded in a letterpress-printed jacket. The jacket paper will be handmade at Gaspereau Press.

Deactivated West 100 is Don McKay's latest set of variations on a poetics of place. Armed with lunch and relevant reading material, McKay invites us to join him on Vancouver Island for a series of explorations that depend on first losing our way. In the spirit of Vis à Vis (Gaspereau Press, 2001), McKay embarks on a project to locate a human understanding of place in the midst of wilderness and in the scheme of infinite time. In six movements of prose and poetry, questions are clarified and answers begun. Home is a series of habits, McKay suggests, as he recounts a personal tradition that involves selecting a stone from a local beach, familiarizing himself with it over the years, and then returning it from his pocket to the same beach and selecting a new one. Picking up the discussion of place and wilderness that began in Vis à Vis, McKay launches it in a new direction, headlong into the geologic/geopoetic time scale where crystals, magma, terranes and Xenophanes affirm an understanding of how we inhabit space and time. At the centre of the collection is a series of poems dedicated to the Shay locomotive, which powered Vancouver Island's logging industry in the 1920s. Here the natural and the built coexist, mental and geographical locations intersect, and wilderness and creativity border. These poems are followed by a set of journeys made for the purpose of losing the way and a treatise on natural clearings. On the ground, McKay is both precise and imaginative, pursuing the specific interstices where abstractions leak into the forest, and walks follow creeks into wilder, less habitable areas of thought. "The background for Deactivated West 100 is a particular fault line on southern Vancouver Island known as the Loss Creek-Leech River fault," says McKay. "It is very eloquent because it is marked on the surface by a deep canyon-at least at its western end, in which Loss Creek, the Leech River and a couple of reservoirs lie. I decided, as part of my apprenticeship to west coast landscapes, to walk the fault line from end to end and take note of whatever it presented to me in terms of rocks, plants, animals, birds (of course) and human history. A lot of that walking was done on the old deactivated bush road which follows Loss Creek and gives the book its title. Since the area has been very aggressively logged, this also led me into the history and politics of forestry hereabouts-including technological advances like the Shay locomotive and the Stihl chainsaw, both of whom make appearances in the book." Deactivated West 100 proceeds with the same mix of humour, humility and determined authenticity that have characterized McKay's previous works. At a pace that falls somewhere between stroll and clamber, McKay introduces a potent set of ideas with which to situate ourselves in the woods. This book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Electra and printed offset on laid paper.

The poetry of Don McKay is renowned for its piquant wit, lyric emotion, and pitch-perfect vernacular music. His work has received national acclaim and the recognition of many awards, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, which he has won twice, and, most recently, from the prestigious and internationally known Griffin Poetry Prize, for which his most recent book was a finalist. Camber is the lilt in the physics of flight, the anti-gravitational alchemy of both wings and poetry. It is also at the heart of the poetry of Don McKay. Spanning three decades, and drawing on all of McKay’s major collections, this selection distills the essence of his craft and provides an overview of, and an ideal introduction to, the work to date of one of Canada’s most celebrated poets.

In Vis à Vis, Don McKay charts a vision of poetics that keeps its feet on the ground and its eyes on the horizon. As one of Canada's leading poets, McKay has long been known for his passionate engagement with his natural surroundings. This book collects three essays on this relationship, together with new and previously published poems that further demonstrate these ideas. Using bushtits, baler twine, Heidegger and Levinas, McKay sets out to explore some of the almost unspeakable concepts driving the use of language particular to poets, and the arguably skewed relationship human beings have with their natural surroundings. In a book the Globe & Mail calls "stylishly constructed" and "impeccably casual," one of Canada's best-loved writers offers his own sense of poetics.

Bring the world a little closer with these multicultural books. An excellent way for students to appreciate and learn cultural diversity in an exciting hands-on format. Each book explores the history, language, holidays, festivals, customs, legends, foods, creative arts, lifestyles, and games of the title country. A creative alternative to student research reports and a time-saver for teachers since the activities and resource material are contained in one book.