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    Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay
    Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay
    Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay
    Ebook116 pages1 hour

    Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay

    By Don McKay

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    About this ebook

    This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay’s best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Méira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay’s afterword written especially for this volume in which McKay reflects on his own writing process—its relationship to the earth and to metamorphosis.

    Don McKay has published eight books of poetry. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1991 (for Night Field) and in 2000 (for Another Gravity), a National Magazine Award (1991), and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 1984 (for Birding, Or Desire). Don McKay was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize for Camber and was the Canadian winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip. Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, McKay has been active as an editor, creative writing teacher, and university instructor, as well as a poet. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of New Brunswick, The Banff Centre, The Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the BC Festival of the Arts. He has served as editor and publisher of Brick Books since 1975 and from 1991 to 1996 as editor of The Fiddlehead. He resides in British Columbia.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherWilfrid Laurier University Press
    Release dateAug 2, 2009
    ISBN9781554586585
    Field Marks: The Poetry of Don McKay
    Author

    Don McKay

    Don McKay has published eight books of poetry. Among his many awards are the Governor General’s Award in 1991 (for Night Fields) and in 2000 (for Another Gravity). He was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize for Camber and was the Canadian winner in 2007 for Strike/Slip. Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, Don McKay has been active as an editor, creative writing teacher, and university instructor, as well as a poet. He lives in Newfoundland.

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      Book preview

      Field Marks - Don McKay

      Acknowledgements

      Foreword

      At the beginning of the twenty-first century, poetry in Canada—writing and publishing it, reading and thinking about it—finds itself in a strangely conflicted place. We have many strong poets continuing to produce exciting new work, and there is still a small audience for poetry; but increasingly, poetry is becoming a vulnerable art, for reasons that don’t need to be rehearsed.

      But there are things to be done: we need more real engagement with our poets. There needs to be more access to their work in more venues—in classrooms, in the public arena, in the media—and there needs to be more, and more different kinds of publications, that make the wide range of our contemporary poetry more widely available.

      The hope that animates this new series from Wilfrid Laurier University Press is that these volumes will help to create and sustain the larger reader-ship that contemporary Canadian poetry so richly deserves. Like our fiction writers, our poets are much celebrated abroad; they should just as properly be better known at home.

      Our idea has been to ask a critic (sometimes herself a poet) to select thirty-five poems from across a poet’s career; write an engaging, accessible introduction; and have the poet write an afterword. In this way, we think that the usual practice of teaching a poet through eight or twelve poems from an anthology will be much improved upon; and readers in and out of classrooms will have more useful, engaging, and comprehensive introductions to a poet’s work. Readers might also come to see more readily, we hope, the connections among, as well as the distances between, the life and the work.

      It was the ending of an Al Purdy poem that gave Margaret Laurence the epigraph for The Diviners:but they had their being once / and left a place to stand on. Our poets still do, and they are leaving many places to stand on. We hope that this series will help, variously, to show how and why this is so.

      —Neil Besner

      General Editor

      Biographical Note

      Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, in 1942, Don McKay was educated at the universities of Western Ontario and Wales, where he earned his Ph.D. in 1971. He taught English and Creative Writing at Western and the University of New Brunswick for twenty-seven years before retiring to write poetry full time. McKay has long enjoyed a celebrated reputation as a mentor to other writers; he has worked at the Sage Hill Writing Experience in Saskatchewan and at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He has also been prominent as an editor and a publisher: with Stan Dragland, he was the founding publisher and editor in 1975 of the small Ontario press Brick Books, one of Canada’s leading poetry presses, and he edited the well-known literary journal The Fiddlehead at the University of New Brunswick from 1991–96. After his teaching career, McKay settled in Victoria with his partner, the poet and philosopher Jan Zwicky.

      McKay’s poetry has won many honours and prizes, including two Governor General’s awards, for Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000). He was nominated for the prestigious Griffin Prize in 2004. His first book of poems, Air Occupies Space, appeared in 1973; other volumes include Long Sault (1975), Lependu (1978), Lightning Ball Bait (1980), Birding, or Desire (1983), Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night (1987), Night Field (1991), Apparatus (1997), Another Gravity (2000), and the chapbook, Varves (2003). His most recent book is the collection Camber: Selected Poems 1983– 2000 (2004).

      Introduction

      Song for the Song of the Dogged Birdwatcher

      Award-winning poet, essayist, critic, beloved teacher and professor, Don McKay taught English and creative writing at The University of Western Ontario and the University of New Brunswick before moving to Victoria with his partner, acclaimed poet Jan Zwicky. McKay has worked as poetry editor for The Fiddlehead magazine, manuscript reader for Brick Books, and poetry facilitator at The Banff Centre; he has twice won the Governor General’s Award, for Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000). Readers, students, browsers, and loiterers between the pages of McKay’s poems are fortunate in their access to a fine poet who is lyrical, wise, and winsome in his writings on nature, birdwatching, wilderness poetics, and the homing instinct in, amongst other things, his eccentrically philosophical field guide Vis-à-Vis: Fieldnotes on Poetry and Wilderness (2001). Although bonded by nothing so categorical as a school, McKay’s environmental poetics, his peculiarly gentle, un-grasping, disowning brand of nature poetry has often been grouped with that of poets such as Tim Lilburn, Dennis Lee, Roo Borson, Robert Bringhurst, and Jan Zwicky—ecologically centred poets inspired by the conflict between inspiration and gnosis, instinct and knowledge.

      On Birding

      Sparrows burning

      bright bright bright against the wind

      —Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow

      (Birding, or Desire)

      McKay is an avid birdwatcher, and his poetry is alive, bright, with the presence of birds— imagined, metaphoric, in flight, grounded, winging it across southern Ontario skies or pressed, wildflower-like, between the stern pages of the hobbyist’s field guide: The Birds of Canada. Indeed, this reference guide becomes something of a quirky leitmotif entangled in the pages of Birding as its earnest, binocular-gazing protagonist lopes across fields and streams, peering into thickets and over hillocks. The point, as many critics have remarked

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