Don McKay – författare

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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 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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

“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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

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 the Trade Paperback edition.

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.From the Trade Paperback edition.

The sixth book of poems by Don McKay.

The first anthology to focus on the rich tradition of Canadian nature poetry in English, Open Wide a Wilderness is a survey of Canada's regions, poetries, histories, and peoples as these relate to the natural world. The poetic responses included here range from the heights of the sublime to detailed naturalist observation, from the perspectives of pioneers and those who work in the woods and on the sea to the dismayed witnesses of ecological destruction, from a sense of terror in confrontation with the natural world to expressions of amazement and delight at the beauty and strangeness of nature, our home. Arranged chronologically, the poems include excerpts from late-eighteenth-century colonial pioneer epics and selections from both well-known and more obscure nineteenth- and twentieth-century writers. A substantial section is devoted to contemporary writers who are working within and creating a new ecopoetic aesthetic in the early twenty-first century. Don McKay's introductory essay, ""Great Flint Singing,"" explores in McKay's inimitable way the thorny issues of Canadian poets' representations of nature over the past 150 years. Focusing on key texts by Duncan Campbell Scott, Charles G.D. Roberts, Earle Birney, Dennis Lee, and others, the essay traces Wordsworthian influences in a New World context, celebrates Canadian poets' love of natural history observation, and finds a way through a rich and contradictory tradition to current trends in ecopoetics.