Read This: Strike/Slip
Poetry by Don McKay (McClelland & Stewart)
REVIEW BY Chris Chambers
Perhaps Canada’s greatest living poet, Don McKay offers his first new collection since the amazing (GG-winning) Another Gravity (2000). Where Another Gravity seemed (roughly) to be about the relationship between breath and the wind, gravity and flight; Strike/Slip is more about landing—or moving across land, and the relationship between rock and stone. Both collections have sensational poems about birds and the moon, struggling to place them (birds calling, flying, trapped in the house; the moon as cold stone in the sky), as he works to place himself, and us “mortals,” upon the earth within the 40 million year continuum it took to make it here.
From his vocab to his ideas he achieves a real nice balance between the heavy and the light. He’s playful with language, not afraid to throw in the f-word, or reference the “chthonic shear.” Why’s he so good? Check out what he can do with one beautiful stone, “living in my pocket as its sage, as my third,/uncanny testicle, the wise one,/the one who will teach me to desire/only whatever happens.”
