Poem: Close-up on a Sharp-Shinned Hawk by Don McKay

CLOSE-UP ON A SHARP-SHINNED HAWK

Concentrate upon her attributes:
the accipiter's short
roundish wings, streaked breast, talons fine
and slender as the x-ray of a baby's hand.
The eyes (yellow in this hatchling
later deepening to orange then
blood red) can spot
a sparrow at four hundred metres and impose
silence like an overwhelming noise
to which you must not listen.

Suddenly, if you're not careful, everything
goes celluloid and slow
and threatens to burn through and you
must focus quickly on the simple metal band around her leg
by which she's married to our need to know.


This poem is among those selected by Don McKay for his audiobook release with Rattling Books: Songs for the Songs of Birds.

Presently the digital download is 30% off for Poetry Month.
The Audiobook CD is available from Fred's Records in St. John's, Newfoundland.

Don McKay

Click here to read a poem ("Midnight Dip") by Canadian poet Don McKay, accompanied by music from the film Lord of the Rings.

Listen to an excerpt from Rattling Books' unabridged audio book edition of McKay's poetry collection Songs for the Songs of Birds, available as an audio CD or an MP3 download.

Rattling Books produces Canadian audiobooks in Newfoundland and Labrador.

Don McKay, Songs for the Song of Creation

Two-time winner of a Governor General's Literary Award, winner of the prestigious Griffin Poetry Prize, Member of the Order of Canada and co-founder (with Stan Dragland) of Brick Books, Don McKay has been writing and publishing some of the best eco-poetry in Canada for nearly forty years. He used to do this in places such as Ontario and British Columbia, but these days McKay is praising the natural world from Newfoundland and Labrador.

McKay has been quoted as saying his poetry is “nature poetry in a time of environmental crisis.” Here is one of McKay's superlative hymns to all things bright and beautiful:

Song for the Song of the Loon

If that’s the word:
the song’s already gone
before it’s uttered so the ear is left
full of its emptiness,
bereft.
It seems the loon
opens its throat to some old
elemental wind, it seems that time
has finally found its syrinx and for a moment
lets itself be voice.
Jesus,
what perilous music!
Surely, like Odysseus, we ought
to stop our ears against this feral
MRI with its dreadful
diagnostic reverb?
But no, we would rather
be stricken, rather suspect
that the spirit also is a migratory species,
that it is right now flying to star river —
as the ancients called the Milky Way — that in
fact it is already there,
yodelling for no one and
ignoring us, the collectors,
with our heads full of closets,
our hearts full of ovens,
and our sad feet.

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Listen to Don McKay read a poem from Songs for the Songs of Birds, which contains poems selected for Rattling Books and read by the author on the theme of birds, birding and flight. Songs for the Songs of Birds is available as an MP3 download or an audio CD.

Don McKay Presents at Cape Breton University Conference

Griffin Prize-winning Canadian poet Don McKay will deliver a presentation on Thursday, August 19 as part of the three-day Association of Literature, Environment and Culture in Canada conference at Cape Breton University. Click here to more.

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Songs for the Songs of Birds, a selection of Don McKay's poems on birds, birding and flight, is available as an audiobook, read by the author, from Rattling Books.

Don McKay Sends Stephen Harper John Steffler's The Grey Islands

Griffin Prize-winning poet Don McKay has sent Prime Minister Stephen Harper a copy of John Steffler's poetry collection The Grey Islands as part of Yann Martel's What is Stephen Harper Reading blog. Read McKay's accompanying letter here.

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John Steffler's The Grey Islands and Don McKay's Songs for the Songs of Birds (a selection of McKay's poems on birds, birding and flight) are available as audio CDs or digital download from Rattling Books.

Don McKay Reads at Banff Centre for the Arts

Griffin Poetry Prize-winning poet Don McKay will give a free reading at the Rolston Recital Hall in Banff, Alberta as part of the Banff Centre's Writing Studio reading series. The reading will take place on Thursday, May 15, at 7:30 PM.

Click here to visit the Banff Centre's website.

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Don McKay is the author of numerous books of poetry, among them Songs for the Songs of Birds, an audiobook recently released by Rattling Books. Songs features a selection of previously published and unpublished poems read by the author. McKay's rich reading voice is complemented by recordings of birdsong, identified to species.

Rattling Books releases new poetry title by Don McKay, Songs for the Songs of Birds

Songs for the Songs of Birds
by Don McKay

A selection of poems selected and read by Don McKay.

Poems selected by the Author on the theme of birds, birding and flight. The work of a much loved Canadian birding poet Songs for the Songs of Birds celebrates the way birds "articulate the air" and considers what the world would be without them.

Narrated by the Author, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species. Listen to poetry while learning bird songs!

Many of the poems in this selection have appeared in previous printed collections of poetry by Don McKay: Camber (McClelland & Stewart, 2004), Strike / Slip (McClelland & Stewart, 2006). A few make their first appearance in this selection.

Field Recordings of birds by Dave Fifield
Cover photograph of a Song Sparrow by Dave Fifield
Cover design by Mike Mouland
With thanks to Stan Dragland.

the poems:
in aornis
alibi
field marks 2
close up of a sharp shinned hawk
song for the song of the white throated sparrow
song for the song of the chipping sparrow
song for the song of the common raven
song for the song of the canada geese
early instruments
midwintering
the bellies of fallen breathing sparrows
adagio for a fallen sparrow
field marks
bird that never wert
song for the songs of the common loon
pine siskin
song for the song of the varied thrush
song for the song of the wood thrush
ascent with thrushes
ravens at play over mount work
sometimes a voice
lift
drag
load
hover
angle of attack
plummet
glide
hang time
turbulence
sometimes a voice 2
but nature has her darker side
nocturnal migrants
a barbed wire fence meditates on a goldfinch
summer at leith
gynecology
UFO

Praise for Don McKay

”These exuberantly musical and shrewd poems are ecological in the fullest sense of the word: they seek to elucidate our relationships with our fragile dwelling places both on the earth and in our own skins.”
— New York Times Book Review

“He is our most inventive poet, a master of metaphor and a stylist with impeccable tone.”— Patrick Lane, Globe and Mail

“In McKay’s work, attention is the foundation of a poetics and an ethics in which otherness is respected, indeed cherished, for its ability to unhouse.”— Judges’ citation, 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize

Tom Pow on Don McKay

Just came across this piece (from Arc) by Scottish poet Tom Pow on the poetry of Don McKay:

In “Fridge Nocturne”, a short poem near the beginning of Don McKay’s selected poems, the sleepless poet lies listening to the sound of his fridge, ‘the old/armless weeping willow of the kitchen’. The fridge’s “Humble murmur” brings to his mind several distant rivers—“the Saugeen, the Goulais/the Raisin”. The permeability of the border between the domestic world and the wilderness which lies beyond it marks a landscape whose vastness teaches early that, “Lonely is a knife whose handle fits the mind/too well, its oldest and most hospitable friend” (“Nocturnal Animals”). However, “There is a loneliness/ which must be entered rather than resolved” (“On Leaving”) and to enter the wilderness with Don McKay is to have the sharpest, most informed and responsive guide...

To read the rest of this article, please click here.

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Rattling Books has just released Songs for the Songs of Birds, a selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight written and read by Don McKay. The soundtrack also features bird song recordings identified to species.

Online Interviews with Rattling Books Authors: Don McKay interview at Gaspereau Press site

Oh, Noble Nature Poet: An interview (of sorts) with Canada’s foremost nature poet, Don McKay
(First published in the Gaspereau Press 2001 Omnibus Reader)

The following is all that remains of an interview between Kathleen Martin and Don McKay, taped somewhere in the great Canadian North. the tape opens with sounds of water lapping gently and the occasional plash-splash of a paddle.

KM: Do you always write in a canoe like this?
DM: Yep. Gets me away from the paparazzi and the evils of digital technology. You know, that’s a not-too-bad J stroke you’re doing, young lady. Try not to shift your weight, though, it’s making me spill my martini.

.....read the rest.

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Songs for the Songs of Birds, a selection of poems written and read by Don McKay on the themes of birds, birding and flight is published by Rattling Books.

Thesis Defence: the Poetry of Don McKay

Notice of Defence

On Friday, July 27th at 12:30pm in Room 200 of the University of British Columbia Graduate Student Centre, Travis Mason will defend his doctoral thesis, "Ornithology of Desire: Birding in the Ecotone and the Poetry of Don McKay".

We wish him the best of luck.

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Coming soon from Rattling Books:

Songs for the Songs of Birds, Don McKay's selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight. Narrated by Don McKay, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species. Click here to hear Don McKay reading "Sometimes a Voice 1".

Don McKay Reading from Camber: Selected Poems

Audio and video of Don McKay reading from Camber: Selected Poems, 1983-2000

Follow the above link to hear three-time Griffin Poetry Prize nominee and 2007 winner Don McKay read from his selected poems at the 2005 Griffin award ceremony.

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Camber was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2004. Strike/Slip, Canadian winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize, was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2006.

Coming soon from Rattling Books:

Songs for the Songs of Birds, Don McKay's selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight. Narrated by Don McKay, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species.

Last Tango in Toronto: More about McKay

from Torontoist.com's Account of the Griffin Prize Ceremony, June 8, 2007

Dancing in the Distillery: the 2007 Griffin Gala
Sharon Harris

Buzz about the Seventh Annual Griffin Poetry Prize began when its 2007 judges were announced last November. Anticipation grew when the shortlist was unveiled two months ago, and on June 5th, the nominated poets performed for an enthusiastic sold-out crowd at The Macmillan Theatre.
And finally! The winners were presented during a vibrant awards gala last Wednesday evening at the Stone Distillery. As you’ve probably heard by now, Charles Wright's Scar Tissue and Don McKay's Strike/Slip won the International and Canadian Awards. The C$100,000 purse is shared between the two winners, and is the most generous poetry prize in the world.
At the ceremony, the word, “generous” was often heard. Throughout the evening, Prize Founder Scott Griffin, and his wife, Krystyne, were also described as altruistic, hospitable, greathearted, kindhearted, philanthropic, and thoughtful. In his acceptance speech, Charles Wright (pictured left) lauded the couple’s “generosity of spirit” and “just plain niceness.”
Host Scott Griffin began the proceedings with a speech about the importance of poetry, and presented The Lifetime Recognition Award to legendary poet Tomas Tranströmer. The Swedish poet, who was in attendance with his wife, Monica, has been translated into English more than any poet in the world, and is often called one of our greatest living poets. Tranströmer’s work was read in Swedish by Monica Tranströmer, and in translation by Griffin Trustee Robin Robertson. Trustee Robert Hass paid tribute with a moving speech about the poet’s career; glasses were raised. Later in the evening, Canadian winner Don McKay cited Tomas as “the most important poet” in his life[...]

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Strike/Slip by Don McKay was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2007.

Coming soon from Rattling Books:

Songs for the Songs of Birds, Don McKay's selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight. Narrated by the author, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species.

Babstock on Poetry, Popularity and Purses

Globe & Mail Interview with Ken Babstock
June 6, 2007
James Adams

What's popularity any way?.... A newspaper can feature an article about a handbag every single Saturday. But does poetry want that?... People in the culture are reading poetry, always have and always will. I just don't know if it has to have the same face as Paris Hilton. – Ken Babstock

Ken Babstock admits he has done his "fair share of griping about awards' short lists," especially when his name hasn't appeared on one honour roll or another.
"Mostly, it's a way of talking yourself down from the bad trip of disappointment, that edge of crazy bitterness," the 37-year-old Toronto poet acknowledged with a laugh the other day. "You put a lot of work into your writing, and everyone wants a little validation, a little recognition just like in any other performer's life, any other pursuit."
In the past few months, however, Babstock has had little cause for caterwauling. On Monday, his third book, Airstream Land Yacht, was named the English-language winner of the $10,000 Trillium Book Award for Poetry...
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Airstream Land Yacht was published by House of Anansi in 2006.

Don McKay was the winner of this year's Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip, McClelland & Stewart, 2007.

Coming soon from Rattling Books: Songs for the Songs of Birds, Don McKay's selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight. Narrated by the author, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species.

Don McKay Wins Griffin Poetry Prize

Griffin Prize Press Release

Toronto – June 6, 2007
Charles Wright’s Scar Tissue and Don McKay’s Strike/Slip are the International and Canadian winners of the seventh annual Griffin Poetry Prize. The C$100,000 Griffin Poetry Prize, the richest poetry prize in the world for a single volume of poetry, is divided between the two winners. The prize is for first edition books of poetry published in 2006, and submitted from anywhere in the world.
The awards event was hosted by Scott Griffin, founder of the prize. Renowned poet Matthew Rohrer was the featured speaker. Judge Karen Solie announced the International winner and John Burnside announced the Canadian winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize.
Hundreds of guests celebrated the awards, including Canada’s former Governor General, the Right Honourable Adrienne Clarkson; The Honourable Caroline di Cocco, Minister of Culture; renowned Canadian authors Margaret Atwood and Michael Ondaatje; and internationally acclaimed British poet Robin Robertson, author of Swithering, winner of the 2006 Forward Poetry Prize for Best Poetry Collection of the Year; and poets Carolyn Forché and Robert Hass, former US Poet Laureate...

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Strike/Slip was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2007.

Coming soon from Rattling Books:

Songs for the Songs of Birds, Don McKay's selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight. Narrated by the author, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species.

Toronto Star Article on Poet Don McKay

Interview with poet Don McKay from the Toronto Star, June 4, 2007

McKay Hopes Award Boosts Poetry's Rep
Poet, nominated for $50,000 Griffin Prize, says it isn't the money that matters to him
Vit Wagner, Publishing Reporter

If poet Don McKay is thinking about what it would be like to cash the $50,000 cheque that comes with winning the Griffin Poetry Prize, the two-time runner-up isn't letting on.

"I try not to focus on that aspect of it too much because the money is not the heart of it," he says on the line from Banff Centre, where he has spent the spring coaching young writers.

"It's nice for the poet who wins, but if the prize is going to work it has to work in other ways as well. It has to work as a way of making the public aware of poetry's importance and presence in the society."

That said, McKay understands the prospect of a $50,000 payout to a Canadian poet – coupled with an additional $50,000 award to an international writer – can't help but generate attention for an increasingly marginal literary form.

Strike/Slip, published last year by McClelland & Stewart, earned McKay a third nomination in the seven-year history of the Griffin Prize, launched by philanthropist and poetry lover Scott Griffin.

McKay's Another Gravity was among the nominees for the inaugural award in 2001, losing to Anne Carson's Men in the Off Hours. He was also shortlisted in 2005, the year Roo Borson's Short Journey Upriver Toward Oishida was the Canadian winner. This year, the Canadian field includes Ken Babstock's Airstream Land Yacht and Priscila Uppal's Ontological Necessities.

The four-member international short list comprises Paul Farley's Tramp in Flames, Rodney James's Salvation Blues, Frederick Seidel's Ooga-Booga and Charles Wright's Scar Tissue.

The two winners will be announced Wednesday.

All seven shortlisted poets will offer recitations from the nominated works during a public reading tomorrow at the UofT's MacMillan Theatre.

Strike/Slip is the 11th collection for the 65-year-old McKay, who made his debut in 1973 with Air Occupies Space and who has twice won the Governor General's Literary Award for poetry. An avid birder, McKay is regarded as Canada's foremost nature poet.

His poems, containing elements of botany, geology and other natural sciences, were praised by this year's jurists for exploring the "uncertain ground between the known and unknown, between the names we have given things and things as they are." Since retiring in 1996 from teaching creative writing to university students, McKay has been at even greater leisure to conduct "field work" that can range from walking through a field to hunkering down in the library with an ornithology encyclopedia.

"My view is that poetry is the point where language is humbled by the sense that it realizes that it isn't able to adequately describe the world," he says. "There's something that eludes it. And so it's language pointing beyond its own capacities."

Writing poetry, he also understands, is not a pursuit for anyone who craves the kind of celebrity and riches that go with reaching a mass audience. "There's a power that goes with not being mainstream," he says. "Poetry is the oldest linguistic art. We have cultures that have poetry that don't even have a written language. I wouldn't be writing it off. I wouldn't even be worrying about it."

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Strike/Slip was published by McClelland & Stewart in 2007.

Coming soon from Rattling Books:

Songs for the Songs of Birds, Don McKay's selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight. Narrated by the author, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species.

Don McKay on How does poetry connect us with our environment?

Currently the Poet for April on the Words at Large website is Don McKay.You can read Don's response to a set of questions there which include the following:

How does poetry connect us with our environment?

On this subject I have written quite a lot in Vis a Vis. Briefly, I think the qualities of attention that are endemic to poetry—a longing which is, unlike many other versions of desire, without the urge to possess—are also attitudes which we ought to bring to the naked world. Poetic attention assumes that the other is valuable in itself, and not solely as a category of human affairs (a "resource" or an aesthetic adornment, for example). The genre sometimes known as "thing poetry" often encourages that attitude by approaching ordinary objects as mysterious, independent beings. If you can find the secret power in a chair or spoon, finding it in granite will be a snap.

Don McKay Poet of the Month: CBC Words at Large website

Don McKay is the Poet of the Month for April on the CBC website Words at Large.

Don McKay shortlisted for Griffin Poetry Prize once again

The following excerpt is from an online CBC article.
Read the whole article here.

Canadian Don McKay shortlisted for Griffin Poetry Prize
Tuesday, April 3, 2007 1:29 PM ET
CBC Arts

Canadian poetry veteran Don McKay and Frederick Seidel, one of the founding editors of iconic literary magazine The Paris Review, are among the seven shortlisted poets vying for the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize.

Canadian poet Don McKay received his third nomination for the Griffin Poetry Prize on Tuesday. McKay, a two-time Governor General's Literary Award winner, logged his third Griffin nomination at the shortlist announcement in Toronto Tuesday for one of the world's most lucrative poetry honours.

"Don McKay is up for the third time because he is a really, truly great poet. I would be surprised if he wasn't [nominated] regularly," prize founder Scott Griffin told CBC Arts Online moments after he and trustee David Young unveiled the 2007 finalists.

"The fact that some of the names are coming up and recurring for the second or third time, that gets people familiar with these poets and, hopefully at some point, they say, 'Well maybe I should try and read some of these guys and see what it's all about.'"

Read the rest of this article here.


Don McKay has a title forthcoming from Rattling Books this spring. Songs for the Songs of Birds is a selection of poems on the theme of birds, birding and flight selected and read by Don McKay.

Poetry in the Library (Memorial University of Newfoundland)

Poetry in the Library presents new work from four St. John's poets, Susan Ingersoll, Wade Kearley, Agnes Walsh and Shoshanna Wingate, as well as poetry from Memorial's outgoing Writer-in-Residence, Don McKay.
Readers will find poems posted throughout the Queen Elizabeth II Library and online at http://www.library.mun.ca/qeii/pil/index.php
If you would like to comment on this project or make suggestions, please contact Pat Warner at pwarner@mun.ca.