 [ Large Image ] | The Shell of the Tortoise: Four Essays & an Assemblage Don McKay 2011 / Books & Reading / $25.95 9781554471089 / Trade paper / 160 pp Don McKay is back from another geopoetic field season and has typed up his notes. The resulting essays continue his investigation into the relationship between poetry and wilderness, particularly into the characteristics of metaphor as a tool. “Art occurs whenever a tool attempts to metamorphose into an animal” asserts McKay in an essay on the myth of Hermes and his tortoise-shell lyre. He also takes us to the fossil beds of Newfoundland’s Mistaken Point to consider the fault line between scientific rigour and the poetic capacity for astonishment; over a buggy, boggy portage with Duncan Campbell Scott, surveying Canadian poetry’s complex relationship with wilderness; to the imagined film set of From Here to Infinity to reflect on metaphor’s success in communicating the vastness of deep time, vastness which raw data fails to transmit; and into the Muskwa Assemblage, a poetic landscape which models his assertion that “In poetry, there is no ‘been there, done that’; everything is wilderness.” To purchase this title: Add it to your cart | Other Books by this Author |  | All New Animal Acts: Essays, Stretchers, Poems Don McKay 2020 / Literary Criticism / $24.95 CAN 9781554472154 / Trade paper / 144 pp |  | The Muskwa Assemblage Don McKay 2009 / Poetry / $49.95 CAN 9781554470655 / Trade paper / 48 pp |  | Deactivated West 100 Don McKay 2005 / Books & Reading / $59.95 CAN 9781554470099 / Fine / 128 pp |  | Deactivated West 100 Don McKay 2005 / Books & Reading / $25.95 CAN 9781554470082 / Trade paper / 128 pp |  | Vis à Vis: Field notes on Poetry & Wilderness Don McKay 2001 / Books & reading / $49.95 CAN 9781894031516 / Fine / 112 pp |  | Vis à Vis: Field notes on Poetry & Wilderness Don McKay 2001 / Books & reading / $14.95 CAN 9781894031509 / Trade paper / 112 pp |
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