Canada's landscape is an especially fertile ground for good writing. Many of the very best writers in Canada mine, take their cues and conflicts from the rich topography of Canada's landscape. For them Canada is a land that speaks with history, beauty and mystery. Many of these writers trace their descent back to Ireland or Scotland; they have a special sensitivity to the flavors and feels of landscape, a certain inheritance of their family history and lore and a linked awareness of similar jagged coastlines: between Ireland/Scotland and Canada's east and west coast - each speaking to the poet of a greater force than himself.
Don McKay is one the very best Canadian poets. Much of his poetry has helped to enshrine landscape and atmosphere as a primary canvas in Canadian poetry. His poetry may be said to have created an environment for Canadian poetry in the late 20th century. Now, in his sixties, McKay must see himself on new and strange footing. Already the recipient of two Governor General's Awards for Poetry and shortlisted twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize, McKay may be said to be "running out of room" in Canadian poetry. As his poetry begins to advance and inch south of the border - where there is greater room- he has wisely returned in his latest collection to his time-tested and true placed in Canada's landscape.
Strike/Slip takes place at an extreme point of pressure: it is the titanic point of entry for McKay on the cusp of international literary acclaim, but also the tectonic boundary plate of overexposure from fear and doubt that dwells inside the poet and that inevitably causes easily traversable borders to fold, rip and go awry. Stike/Slip is a tremendous conception on McKay's part that is attempted and approached awkwardly. Faultlines, when considered philosophically, can be as gleaming a metaphor as any; but also as restricting. I think this is the problem for McKay: where do you begin? Where do you go? Where do the poems lead?
McKay's ability as a poet can never be in question. His sensitivity, understanding, possible love of humanity is without parallel. This stanza near the end of the collection from "Look at Me, World" is another instance of a great McKay moment:
Look at me,
bones but no body.
Time passes. The bones
fall in love with the wind,
which teaches them to whistle.
But on the whole Strike/Slip is best described a hotchpotch, a patchwork of metals - if the metaphor gives - overexposed to erosion and never fully synthesized. I am not sure what to make of what feel like salty repetitions and alliterations in many of the poems. In the first poem of the collection, "Astonished -" he begins:
astounded, astonied, astunned, stopped short
and turned toward stone, the moment
filling with its slow
stratified time.
In other poems like "Song for the Song of the Chipping Sparrow," the effect is expanded and this time seems to be misdirected,
Let's go. Let's gargle into song. Let's
clear our phlegm-clogged
fucked-up throats let's stutter our
Dumb way into what
comes next. [...]
The technique appears exacting. But the language is clunky, wobbly and at times wildly unconditioned. The poem continues:
Take death rattle, take
Automatic riffle fire, take t-t-t-t- Tommy Moss
Day after day in grade two failing to finish his name, [...]
One might be prone to say that McKay is attempting to outsmart and out-New Age the New Age poets. But I think the last line here is instructive of the mode McKay is working in. Many of the speakers in these poems are young, juvenile and trying to gain a grasp of Canada's atmosphere. These poems may then be read together as a crash-course or how-to manual in understanding Canada's landscape. That would seem a worthy endeavor for McKay and an interesting point at which to approach his subject matter. But McKay runs into problems when he tries to be too profound, when he brings together in one breath the obscurantism and esotericism of the most detailed geological report with the laid back atmosphere of his geography class.
McKay tells us in the notes at the back of collection that the "strike/slip" of the title refers to an unusual "high-angle fault" such as the San Andreas Fault, the Great Glen Fault in Scotland, and Loss Creek-Leech River Fault on southern Vancouver Island. But if McKay is a geologist, or a geology professor, he still yearns to remain relevant and hip. In "Astonished" we might have exclaimed "odd," when McKay entreated us with these lines: "Cities / as sand dunes, epics / as email." In this all-encompassing world of the metaphor of "strike/slip," there is room it seems for pop-culture references, esotericism and a little geography.
Where we sit and stir for dramatic verve, for a true "song," we instead receive from McKay "Song of the Saxifrage to the Rock." The whole poem is worth quoting to understand a point:
Who is so heavy with the past as you,
Monsieur Basalt? Not the planet's most muscular
depressive, not the twentieth century.
How many fingerholds
have failed, been blown or washed away, unworthy
of your dignified avoirdupois, your strict
hexagonal heart? I have arrived to show you, first
the interrogative mood, then secrets of the niche,
then Italian. Listen, slow one,
let me be your fool, let me sit
on your front porch in my underwear
and tell you risque stories about death. Together
we will mix our dust and luck and turn ourself
into the archipelago of nooks.
In this poem McKay jarringly switches from line to line, from the down to earth grit of fingerholds to heavy and clunky words ("avoirdupois, archipelago") that ill-fit the rest of the poem. Finally, we reach an image of the speaker sitting on the front porch in his underwear, of all things. Somewhere along the way on this journey, we're left dumbfounded. We don't know whether to laugh, cry or be shocked out of our seats. The poem is also inattentively delineated. Many of the breaks are hard to theorize and contemplate, particularly when you compare them to McKay's wonderful delineation in "Loss Creek," where he begins in classic dramatic fashion: "He went there to have it/ exact." The pause, suspense is exact and beguiling. But even in "Loss Creek" McKay too easily slips and reaches for silly, corny, banal attempts at profundity through allusion, "He went there to finger the strike/slip / fissure between the rock and stone between Vivaldi's / waterfall [...]."
Clearly, we are not wrong to hope for so much from McKay. He is a poet of a unique nature, a poet with a great capacity for beauty and grace. We wait for those precious moments of beauty and grace with bated breath and when they do come we are left to stand in awe of McKay's achievement. Later, in "Loss Creek" he writes,
Recognizing the sweet
perils rushing in the creek crawling
through the rock.
His skills are far from the path of the "lost creek" and are always apparent. Now that McKay is on the cusp of commanding an American and international stage, he need not look for a new voice, a new angle. His poetry is far from "lost creek." It is always apparent.
Jason Ranon Uri Rotstein is a writer living in Toronto and Brighton. His reviews regularly appear in publications in North America and the U.K. He can be reached at jason.rotstein@gmail.com.
Canadians have an odd relationship to the U.S. We define ourselves against them, first of all. Many of us in urban centres find guns appalling, our history is closer to compromise than conflict, possibly born out of the need to accommodate both French and English, and the same need has introduced a greater love -- at least in theory -- of diversity, and a recognition diversity is a strength, not a weakness. There is a distinct Canadian identity that Canadians...continue reading
Your second collection of poems, The Cold Panes of Surfaces, is out now. Your first book, Bonfires, won the Canadian Authors Association Poetry Award in 2004. Did winning a national award for your first book bolster your artistic confidence while working on your second, or did you find it daunting, as though you had more to live up to than other poets working on a second collection?
I think it certainly gave me a boost of confidence and the permission I needed to do what I wanted to do artistically with the second book. I didn't feel any outside pressure because of winning the CAA award, or feel that I had any expectations to live up to. Winning the award was terrific, and it was good publicity, but it was also an education on how fleeting such praise can be, and how it leaves your writing life virtually...continue reading