Camber

From AwardAnnals

Reviews

Amazon.com

This selection of poems from Don McKay’s previous books (including two Governor General’s Award winners) highlights the poet’s consistent themes: birds, flight, gravity, the moon, music, the natural world, everyday life. Like any good poet, McKay comes at things from a skewed angle, choosing the words that emphasize the significant blur in his vision, the unexpected note in his musical phrase. Whether writing about an alto sax (“a kazoo with buttons,” “mortality’s exhaust pipe”) or the view from a Via train (“a black lake faintly smoked by blowing snow”), McKay embodies the poet at play. No other poet today can so perfectly meld the profound and the mundane, “the fate of mammals” and “Baked Alaska.”

McKay himself, in the title poem, calls poetry, “That rising curve, the fine line / between craft and magic where we / travel uphill without effort.” These are poems that appear and disappear like the imprint of a bird in the sky. McKay’s true theme is language itself, its ability to fly and fall, its music, its place in our everyday lives. He creates a world where thermals are “like naturally occurring laughter” and a house empty for the holidays is “one missing tooth / in the block’s electric smile.” To have travelled for a short while in the company of Don McKay’s most unusual brain is to see the world refreshed and revitalized, to hear the language resuscitated, to know that poetry lives in “the wilderness / between one breath / and another.” —Mark Frutkin