Before moving to Prince George in 1969, Barry McKinnon was writing single narrative poems that, in terms of form, began to seem outworn and inadequate in his new environment. The emotional range of the lyric had become too personal and limiting. Starting with a poem based on a discarded fragment and a shoebox of photos his prairie grandfather had taken of the family homestead, he began to piece together his first long poem: I Wanted to Say Something.” Though this story had nothing to do with Prince George, the form it generated was large enough and open enough to set the possibilities for writing in the larger dimensions of self and place he had been searching for: the political, the social, the institutional, the environmentalthe layered and fragmented outside/inside he now found himself in. Leaving I Wanted to Say Something” behind as an absent precursor, The Centre: Poems 19702000 begins, appropriately, with The Death of a Lyric Poet”the sequence of poems that initiate his engagement of and life in the north with new and unavoidably present recognitions as sources for the work. The centre” in this sequence of ten long poems thus shifts from a nostalgic, idealized and elegiac rural singularity to a new relentless multiplicity of the urban, where the centre constantly threatens not to hold. The centre” in these books becomes simultaneously the shopping centre, the community centre, the industrial centre: a multiplicity of urban attentions reproducing itself as an articulate awareness of a fractured and fragmented self. Beauty appears in this wasteland only through glimpses of externalized objects of desire: a new, materialized arrhythmia” of the heart, grounded in the scarlet fever of an ever-receding innocence of youth.

The Centre: Poems 1970-2000

McKinnon, Barry

Parenting & Relationships

Talonbooks

These poems span fifteen years of life in the northern industrial output of Prince George, BC. They portray family, friendship, sex, death, health, work, love and human hope as subjects of a harsh social, economic, and bureaucratic system that is itself trapped in its own contradictions and ironies. The Centre is McKinnon's first full-length book since Pulp Log, which won the BC Book Prize for poetry in 1991.

The Centre

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Caitlin Press Inc.

Poetry. IN THE MILLENNIUM is a thirteen-part sequence written over the last ten years that measures a wide range of the poet's experience. The writing emerges in response to human processes, conditions and places: love, sex, death, the insecurities and pressures of the inner and outer world, and the politics of person and place that act as prompts for whatever he, as the poet, is given to reveal.

In the Millennium

Literature & Fiction

Poetry

New Star Books

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Books by McKinnon, Barry