Analyzing 30 years of Don McKay's achievements, this critique explores one of the most original bodies of work in contemporary English-language poetry. Emphasizing details of ornithology, botany, weather, industry, and the arts, as well as focusing on varied geographic settings, his poetry opens countless doors for analysis. Fourteen contributors examine the complex contradictions of McKay's work, including nuanced description and intricate metaphor, philosophical phrasing and folksy idiom, madcap humor and elegy.

"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.

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.

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.

DIVRare and valuable study reveals accomplishments of great 19th-century shipbuilder in era of sailing packet and clipper ship. 58 superb illustrations, including plans, models, maps, etc. /div

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.

"[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.