Bøker av 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 ReviewAn 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.

An angular unconformity is a border between two rock sequences, one lying at a distinct angle to the other, which represents a significant gap -- often millions of years -- in the geologic record. (Imagine a biography that has several decades simply unaccounted for.) It might also be described as a fissure through which deep time leaks into history and upsets its authority. Angular Unconformity shows us a life's work in cross-section, a restless and humane intelligence, ever searching, ever shifting, finding significance in our blink-of-an-eye existence against a backdrop of geological time unimaginable in its scale. A shrewd observer of teh sounds and the poetics of nature, Don McKay attunes his senses to bird song and music, to human presence and geological formations, to vernacular speech and inanimate silence. In his eloquent, yet exuberant encountes with the wilderness, he walks the fault line between the known and the unknown, testing the uncertain mechanism of language and its imperfect gestures toward meaning. This first comprehensive collection of Don McKay's poetry displays this pre-eminent Canadian poet's gift for thinking through metaphor, for channelling a profound philosophical discourse through poetic imagery. In poem after poem, his disciplined attention and contemplative mind break through the commonplace, illuminating an ecological understanding of the world as it is.