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.

Paradoxides: Poems

Literature & Fiction

McKay, Don

Genre Fiction

MCCLELLAND STEWART

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.

Strike/Slip

Contemporary

Birding, or Desire

Poetry

McClelland & Stewart Ltd.

Night Field

“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.

Apparatus

Another Gravity

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.

Camber

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.

Lurch

Bring the world a little closer with these multicultural books. An excellent way for students to appreciate and learn cultural diversity in an exciting hands-on format. Each book explores the history, language, holidays, festivals, customs, legends, foods, creative arts, lifestyles, and games of the title country. A creative alternative to student research reports and a time-saver for teachers since the activities and resource material are contained in one book.

Our Global Village - Poland

Children's Books

Lorenz Educational Press

Angular unconformity: a discordant surface of contact between the deposits of two episodes of sedimentation in which the older, underlying strata have undergone folding, uplift, and erosion before the deposition of the younger sediments, so that the younger strata truncate the older. — Michael Allaby, ed., A Dictionary of Earth Sciences, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008) Angular Unconformity shows us a life's work in cross-section, a restless and humane intelligence, ever searching, ever shifting, finding meaning in our blink-of-an-eye existence against a backdrop of geological time unimaginable in its scale. In this volume, the first comprehensive collection of Don McKay's poetry, this pre-eminent Canadian poet displays his gift for thinking through metaphor, channelling a profound philosophical discourse through plain language and striking imagery. In his poetry, disciplined attention and contemplation break through the commonplace and illuminate an ecological understanding of the world as it is.

Angular Unconformity: Collected Poems 1970-2014

icehouse poetry

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Books by McKay, Don