Don McKay

Don McKay is a poet, teacher, and editor. He has published more than a dozen books in a career that spans five decades. He has twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, and won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip in 2007. His previous essay collections include the GG-shortlisted Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness, Deactivated West 100, and The Shell of the Tortoise, winner of the 2011 BMO Winterset Award. McKay lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.



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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.”



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Other Books by this Author

All New Animal Acts: Essays, Stretchers, Poems
Don McKay

2020 / Literary Criticism, Canadian Poetry / $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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