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Apparatus by Don McKay
“There’s a place / between desire and memory, some back porch / we can neither wish for nor recall,” writes Don McKay inApparatus. The poems in this collection home in on that place – those keenly desired places – where language will not reach.Apparatusis Don McKay’s first collection of new poems since his 1991 award-winningNight 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.
Call Number: PS 8575.K28 1997
ISBN: 9780771057632
Publication Date: 1997
Camber by Don McKay
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.
Call Number: PS 8575 .K28 C36 2004
ISBN: 9780771057656
Publication Date: 2004
Field Marks by Don McKay; Meira Cook (Editor)
This volume features thirty-five of Don McKays best poems, which are selected with a contextualising introduction by Mira 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.
Call Number: eBook
ISBN: 9781280465673
Publication Date: 2006
The Muskwa Assemblage by Don McKay
"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.
Call Number: PS 8575 .K28 M88 2008
ISBN: 9781554470655
Publication Date: 2009
Paradoxides by Don McKay
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 nbsp; 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.
Call Number: PS 8575 .K28 P37 2012
ISBN: 9780771055096
Publication Date: 2012
The Shell of the Tortoise by Don McKay
Don McKay is back from another geopoetic field season and has typed up his notes. The resulting essays continue his investigation into the relationship between poetry and wilderness, particularly into the characteristics of metaphor as a tool. "Art occurs whenever a tool attempts to metamorphose into an animal" asserts McKay in an essay on the myth of Hermes and his tortoise-shell lyre. He also takes us to the fossil beds of Newfoundland’s Mistaken Point to consider the fault line between scientific rigour and the poetic capacity for astonishment; over a buggy, boggy portage with Duncan Campbell Scott, surveying Canadian poetry's complex relationship with wilderness; to the imagined film set of From Here to Infinity to reflect on metaphor’s success in communicating the vastness of deep time, vastness which raw data fails to transmit; and into the Muskwa Assemblage, a poetic landscape which models his assertion that "In poetry, there is no 'been there, done that'; everything is wilderness."
Call Number: PS 8575 .K28 S54 2011
ISBN: 9781554471089
Publication Date: 2011
Vis à Vis by Don McKay; Wesley Bates (Illustrator)
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. Finalist for the 2002 Governor General's Award for Nonfiction.
Call Number: PS 8575 .K28 V58 2001
ISBN: 9781894031509
Publication Date: 2001
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