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Vis ŕ Vis is the beautifully written, and beautifully produced, new collection of essays and poems by Don McKay, a collection that reflects, as he states in his introduction, his own personal attempt to "come to grips with the practice of nature poetry in a time of environmental crisis." With the playfulness and humility that mark the narrative voice and style of Vis ŕ Vis, McKay characterizes this years-long struggle as largely "a series of wrestling matches" between himself, as nature poet, and nature poetry itself, a struggle he confesses to having conclusively lost, the essays and poems offered simply as records of "the drawn matches." So begins this collection, with the profound sense of mystery and reverence for poetry that underlie McKay's searching meditations and their graceful, quietly-offered conclusions.

McKay is fascinated by the fundamental relationship between poetry and wilderness, compelled by the political, spiritual and practical aspects of the complex interaction between human systems of order and structure - like art, language, and field guides - and the elusive objects of their attention. All three essays and both poems gathered here reflect this complex relationship in ways that are theoretically rigorous and openly emotional, each separate work reflecting upon and enlarging various elements of a meditation that is alternately delightful and disturbing, exuberant and, at times, deadly serious.

Several of McKay's primary concerns are dramatically evoked in a stark, single image that occurs in "Baler Twine," the book's powerful opening essay, of a dead raven, its tail missing, a shotgun hole through its back, inexplicably suspended from a roadside tree. Having presented the figure of the raven in the previous pages as the embodiment of spontaneity, as the mythological trickster who "arrives like a brash postcard from the wilderness"(15), this depiction of the immobile, stilled figure is devastating. After expressing his initial reaction to this baffling and dreadful sight, McKay steps narratively out of the scene, "freezes" himself there, holding the dangling raven he has just cut down and enters into a series of speculations about the possible meaning not only of the raven's death, but, more significantly, of the motivation behind its display, allowing, as the very ground of his considerations, the chilling, incontrovertible fact of atrocity:

Displaying it declares that the appropriation is total. A dead body seeks to rejoin the elements; this one is required to function as a sign, a human category - a sign which simply says "we can do this." The raven's being, in Martin Heidegger's terms, was not just used, but used up. (19)

The phenomenon of using is often at the heart of McKay's reflections, constituting one pole of perception and relation in which external realities encountered by the human mind are conceived of in essentially self-referential terms, appropriated in terms of possible function, treated, as he terms it, as "matériel," meaning here "any instance of second-order appropriation, where the first appropriation is the making of tool, or the address to things in the mode of utility. . . This second appropriation of matter may be the colonization of its death" (20). According to McKay, the raven's being and essence, its duende, was basically conscripted as an expression of human will, forced to function as part of an individual statement about power and ability. Opposed to this essentially possessive way of relating to the surrounding world, McKay thoughtfully and passionately suggests an alternative approach, that of "poetic attention," a state of mind that is "a species of longing which is without the desire to possess," in which matter and being is regarded rather than exploited, its unique autonomy or "wilderness" (defined here as "the capacity of all things to elude the mind's appropriations" (21)) revered rather than stripped away to make for a smooth appropriation into human systems of meaning: "this is a form of knowing which counters the 'primordial grasp' in home-making, and celebrates the wilderness of the other; it gives ontological applause" (26). As nature poet, McKay is keenly aware of the inescapable irony inherent in the fact that language, as the means or "tool" of regard and celebration, is still, after all, a system which limits and defines simply by naming and describing. He cautions wisely and strongly against the kind of self-servitude that is the pitfall of the traditional Romantic poetic sensibility, an attitude he wryly dubs "aeolian harpism," which, he notes, is ultimately more concerned with the glorification and contours of the inspired human imagination than with the beauty and dimensions of the object of its attention. His suggestion that the work of the nature poet be viewed as basically similar, in nature, to that of the translator constitutes a deeply mindful and responsible alternative, a suggestion that stresses the inescapably reductive functions of language and the subsequent need for vigilance: "The persistence of poetic attention during the act of composition is akin to the translator's attention to the original, all the while she performs upon it a delicate and dangerous transformation" (30).

Sustained responsibly and attentively, this conception of poet as translator of the surrounding world can result, according to McKay, in gestures of actual gift-giving, the very act of inscribing in language a gesture of homage and celebration: "When ownership is set aside, appropriation can turn inside out, an opening, a way of going up to something with a gift from home" (31).

Within the context of McKay's suggestion of nature poet as translator and advocacy of using language in a spirit of gift-giving, his final decision to cover the raven protectively and then "drive away; think; read," coupled with his concluding affirmation that "[t]here is imaginative work to be done," constitutes profoundly meaningful individual action, a response that, grounded in reverence and responsibility, is largely remedial in the face of atrocity.

The importance of individual consciousness and personal gesture is further emphasized in "Matériel," the compelling long poem that first appeared in McKay's poetry collection Apparatus and which chillingly illustrates the practical outcomes of personal and collective conceptualizations of the relationship between self and wilderness. The poem begins with two distinct expressions of individual will - that of the tattooed figure of Cain, banished to the Land of Nod, nursing his "seven-fold revenge," his entire personality thinning into anger and the private, burning desire to "leave his mark," and Achilles, who, shown dragging the body of Hector behind him in the dust, is depicted enacting that wrathful desire. The poem becomes progressively terrifying as it moves, in the last two sections, from individual will to collective action, from secretly-nursed vengeance to implemented policy and established ideology. In "The Base," which chronicles a visit to "the forbidden country" of New Brunswick's military base, the poem's speaker is shocked to discover within the environment no overt or blatant expressions of the essentially destructive will behind its construction but rather "banality," "camouflage," "nondescription," in a landscape where "blueberries grow, creeks / sparkle, and an early robin / sings from the scrub" (42). The active spirit behind the base is however, still audible, detectable to the psyche, appearing unbidden when the poet, upon stumbling, encounters an internalized, disembodied directive to "Pick up your god-damned / feet." Against the oppressive virulence of this hostile voice, the poet enacts a single, heavy-hearted gesture - cuts two pussy willow branches as he leaves the base - in the tentative hope that the buds might "unclench, each fragile hair / pom-pommed with pollen, some day / to open into leaf." By poem's end, however, the harsh, militaristic perspective has gained momentum and is given full, unflinching expression by McKay, complete with the horrifying maniacal glee that revels in destruction as a clear demonstration of human will and capability:

You fancy me far from your minds, wandering lonely as a clod in longlost brotherhood, while your door's locked and your life's grammatically insured, yet (listen) scurry scurry (Is - that - Only - A - Rat - In - The - Basement - Better - Phone - Dad - Oh - No - The - Line's - Dead. Mandatory Lightning Flash) yup, here I am with the hook old chum. . .We bombs it back to square one, then, o babes in arms, we bombs square one. (49)

The sensibility encountered at the beginning of the following essay, "Remembering Apparatus," is the exact inverse of the corrosive vehemence and grandiosity depicted in "Matériel." Here, McKay frankly recounts the resounding failure of his energetic attempt at yard-sale entrepreneurship, ruefully describing the onset of rain and the dwindling crowds that appear as the possessions he's lugged up from the basement begin, once freed of their household setting, to take on lives of their own, as "each thing emerged from the general mess into its own identity." His assertion that even everyday tools, though taken for granted, resist our conception, that they "exceed the fact of their construction and exemplify an otherness beyond human design" (57), reflects a sensibility capable of the profound humility attendant to the recognition that mystery and wilderness, despite all of our attempts at ordering the world, are entirely in the ascendant, asserting themselves at every moment: "The wilderness is not just far away and dwindling, but implicit in things we use every day, as close at hand as a flat tire or a missed step" (57). In the place of aggressive assertions of will in relation to wilderness, of gestures, like the displaying of dead ravens, that proclaim simply "this is what we can do," McKay advances the receptive, traditionally passive states of heartbrokenness and longing as more honest, rich and sustaining responses to wilderness, states from which poetry and wonder can issue. Faced with what he calls "moments of linguistic bewilderment," those times when we viscerally experience the "thinness of language," its inability to ever fully capture the essence of that which we perceive, longing, according to McKay, can function as an alternative to fear and to the subsequent defensive posturing and destructive attempts to minimalize what is perceived as the threatening fecundity and foreignness of the Other. Grounded realistically in his acute sense of the poet's inability to ever fully know, own or control external reality, McKay celebrates first apostrophe and then metaphor as those elements of language that serve as reminders of our essential powerlessness in relation to wilderness: "Thanks to metaphor, we know more; but we also know that we don't own what we know"(69).

A sensibility based upon non-defensive openness and its resulting vulnerability is hauntingly imagined in "Canoe People," an achingly beautiful poem inspired by the mythic "spirit beings" of Haida culture who travel perpetually among the islands without any sense of specific destination. In it, McKay envisions a state of being in which, freed of "English with its one-thing-and-then-another-traffic-signalled syntax" and "having no names to hang on," one is directly, powerfully affected by wilderness. In the absence of hierarchical systems of structuring existence, the Canoe People, "knowing nothing, having no raven side / and eagle side to think with, maundering their wayless way / among the islands," occupy an imaginative realm that is beyond dichotomy and division, utterly open to raw, spontaneous experience. When a singing wren passes the canoe, the heart of the spirit being closest to it is punctured by its song, a blue hole forming in his heart, the distance between Self and Other painfully, beautifully collapsed: "already victim of the wren's bright / hammered music, bravely wearing in his heart that / delicate blue hole through which, I think, / he listens" (78).

Throughout Vis ŕ Vis, McKay narratively and stylistically enacts his own call for a use of language that embraces the mystery and beauty of wilderness with enthusiasm and humility. He continually draws attention to the constructed nature of his own argument ("let's keep in mind that this is not a necessary or logical progression") and to the limits inherent in metaphor ("Its wings were large and eloquent, and not like anything I could think of, certainly not like blown-away umbrellas"(19)), debunking over and over again any illusion of rational or artistic supremacy. Indeed, there is a strong "trickster" element in McKay's prose and poetry, a high-spirited, wise-cracking raven that bursts unexpectedly into the narrative, "off to one side of the normal traffic of events" (as McKay says of the position of metaphor within the sentence), frequently transporting the reader into wildly-imagined, whimsical worlds of play. In "The Bushtits' Nest," the book's final essay, McKay humourously envisions Adam's dilemma, imagines his exasperation with "the centralizing and reductive influence of the name," and depicts him stumbling, in linguistic desperation, upon metaphor in a frantic attempt to more accurately describe the screech owl he has named earlier in the day: "It was as if - Adam groped inwardly as he made his way back to the bower, holding the quality of the experience in his mind as though cradling an egg. It was as if . . ." (92). Besides being downright hilarious at times, McKay's meditations are also deeply poetic, his prose richly infused with unexpected phrasings and images, informing the discussion, at times, with ebullience, and, at others, with a sheer, graceful loveliness: "Imagine: a trail made of moments rather than minutes, wild bits of time which resist elapsing according to a schedule. Pauses. Each one bell-shaped, into which you step as an applicant for the position of tongue" (31).

While fully acknowledging the disturbing realities of environmental devastation, nuclear test sites, and the violence of the everyday, the style and sensibility of this collection is luminous, offering a searching, morally responsible understanding of the role of nature poet in this age, a thoughtful vision of how we might ethically position ourselves vis ŕ vis the wilderness that surrounds us that is deeply rooted in an on-going sense of reverence and integrity, brimming with beauty and hope.