Don McKay's poetry collection mixes fairy tales and geology.

G6

Review by Heather Craig

Stumble Upon

del.icio.us

Digg

Facebook

Print

Email

Speak Up

Don McKay, respected purveyor of things poetic, has won numerous awards, from two Governor General's Awards for poetry (1991 and 2000) to the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip. When we pick up a McKay collection we expect great things. Strike/Slip does not let us down.

Enlarge Photo

This is poetry at its most articulate and striking. The poems use the language of geology and nature to examine the various ages of rock and man. They are filled with word play and memorable sounds "in the various dialects of gravity."

In Quartz Crystal, rock is revealed as petrified music. Apostrophe reminds us that Earth "calls our nutrient-rich bodies and nostalgia-heavy heads." From "A Song for the Songs of the Fallen Leaves," which takes us into an allusive world of wordplay, to the complexity of chance and found wisdom in Philosopher's Stone, McKay illustrates the slow transformations of nature, the paradox of loss and accumulation, erosion and sediment.

Time and geological periods collapse and re-form as words sculpted by a master craftsman, "whispering translations of translations." In Specific Gravities the speaker tells us, "As I browse / among the statues it appears / that marble is the way eternity / confers itself on breasts" but stones also speak as markers for mortality.

McKay writes, "everything derives from rock." Rocks are a measure of time, rocks are failed language, rocks are each "a pent rage--All those forces that shaped the original rock - pressure, stress, heat - were actually slumbering ogres who've been tamed, and trained to sing."

Different poetic forms appear and allusions to classical myths step alongside everyday speech. McKay mixes fairy tales and geology, images of cables with Laocoon. He gives us birds, leaves, water, and stone.

These are complex, allusive poems, but they are not elusive. McKay's love of words and his ability to bring us to a new place, a new way of seeing through those words, is evident. He asks "Engine, ingenuity: how could we not love it?" Indeed, how could we not?

Strike/Slip will make you love language for its own sake, and what could make a better recommendation? If that's not enough, read it for the sympathy between the animate and the inanimate, the play of words and ideas, the beauty of the lines. But read it!

Heather Craig lives in Saint John.