Issue 152 Is Online!

search index
of all issues

Search This Site Enter word(s) to search for:

Reader, you know how little it takes to spark your curiosity when you pick up a book. Just a title, or a first line, or a table of contents. From my bookshelves I pull out Russian philosopher Lev Shestov's Potestas Clavium and see the chapter headings "Sancta Superbia," "Destroying and Building," "Thoughts Expressed and Not Expressed," "Music and Phantoms." Hear how such phrases, enticing in themselves, suggest keys or structures for reading many books. Out of Annie Dillard's Pilgrim at Tinker Creek, eyes select the chapter titles "Seeing," "The Fixed," "The Present," "Intricacy," "Fecundity." Even more concentrated, there's the table of contents in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, the lectures Italo Calvino was working on when he died in 1985: "Lightness," "Quickness," "Exactitude," "Visibility," "Multiplicity." Five mere abstractions (Calvino didn't live to write the sixth lecture), yet what a wealth of associations they reach out toward, what a breadth of reading and living they try to encompass.

Calvino's list of those "values, qualities, or peculiarities of literature that are very close to my heart" suggests many poets - Dante, Hopkins, Bishop, Muldoon - but since Don McKay was the poet who came to mind when I first read Six Memos a decade ago, it's McKay's poems I want to re-read and re-enjoy with Six Memos in hand.

 VISIBILITY AND EXACTITUDE

... idling the shoreline where the rock is ground and
polished into jewels by this
overdose of clarity. ("Drinking Lake Superior" SD)

In his lecture "Exactitude," Calvino laments that "language is always used in a random, approximate, careless manner, and this distresses me unbearably," and elsewhere in Six Memos he calls vagueness "the worst blight in modern writing." Against that blight we can place the precision of some poets, especially one as sharp-eyed and unselfishly meticulous as Don McKay. Like a birder with binoculars, a poet like McKay wears "extra eyes around his neck" ("Field Marks" B). Here is a part of McKay's description of a beloved dog:

... small white patches
on his chest, left forepaw and tiny paint-brush
tufts on his tail and prick-sack, winking when he
wagged or
recomposed his curl: ("Luke & Co."NF)

The exactitude of McKay's writing becomes more evident if we compare that quotation to a truncated edit of it: patches / on his chest, forepaw and, / when he wagged it, his tail. That's the merely competent language we'd expect from a slacker, fuzzier poet. McKay gives us the dog's left forepaw, white fur like paint-brush marks, and sound echoes among "prick," "sack," and "wink," those crisp repetitions suggesting verbal as well as observational precision. That a tail can be "recomposed," carefully moved by something beyond unthinking instinct, subtly implies McKay's attentiveness to signs of consciousness and care in other creatures. Even dogs positioning their tails, the verb-choice hints, can be exacting.

"Exactitude" and "visibility" from Calvino's fivefold list easily go together because the former is often a means to the latter. Yet as Calvino writes, "various elements concur in forming the visual part of literary imagination" - not only "direct observation of the real world" but also "phantasmic and oneric transfiguration." Description in Don McKay's poems isn't limited to pictorial detail. At times - as in "a swallow's evening has been usefully compared / to a book comprised entirely of errata slips" ("Field Marks" B) - his precise effects derive from fast-thinking associativeness. For McKay, metaphor is often the means of phantasmic transformation, which sometimes provides greater precision than a more familiar directness: "a treeful of starlings, speckled and / oily as comic book germs or high school wiseguys" ("A Morning Prayer Ending with a Line Borrowed from the Holiday Inn" B) is more idiosyncratic and exact than a treeful of gaudy, iridescent starlings. McKay's avian precision moves from bird-guide delineations to metaphor, as with a sharp-shinned hawk's "short / roundish wings, streaked breast, talons fine / and slender as the x-ray of a baby's hand" ("Close-up of a Sharp-Shinned Hawk" B). Or, vice-versa, they move from metaphor to fieldguidisms, as when a faded goldfinch in September is seen "asway / tossing the thistle's white hairs to the wind," then is described as "brownish grey and / slightly yellow at the throat and shoulder" ("September, Cyprus Lake" B). Other descriptions mix the literal and the associative with great concentration: a ruffed grouse in underbrush is "an obese moth" with "subtle blendings of bar and shade, everything ish, everything soft" ("Camouflage" A). There McKay combines relatively straightforward description ("subtle blendings ..."), metaphor (grouse as fat moth), and impressionism (that generalizing of "ish" and "soft").

At times McKay's language itself foregrounds the struggle toward exactitude, and overturns one word for more precise language. "Twinflower" (A) asks, "What do you call / the muscle we long with? Spirit?" and answers, "I don't think so. Spirit is a far cry. / This is a casting outward which / unwinds inside the chest." The precision there involves questioning one's own vocabulary or that of one's culture, and replacing a term with more evocative, metaphorically complex phrasing. McKay's fastidiousness is revealed - and created - not only by aptly chosen nouns, verbs, and adjectives, but also by prepositions, as at the start of "Paddling in November" (LS): "Not on but in, / to." Another form of exactitude is that of crafted pacing, such as with line-endings and -beginnings. In the poem "Goldenrod, Diving" (A), the passages "A smooth unhurried / gulp," "flight paths teaching / distance to the eye," "the mirror / puckers up and speaks," and "some hot star / seized upon that lens" give particular focus to the words "gulp," "distance," "puckers," and "seized," zeroing in for exact emphasis and timing.

Both Calvino and McKay nonetheless see something illusory in exactitude, acknowledging that words can't replace or fully evoke what they point toward. Despite his savouring of descriptive detail, McKay recognizes the pretensions of accurate description, the distance between language and bird. One poem refers to "birds no one has ever seen / uncaged in any book unguessed / by metaphor" ("The Night Shift" SD). The guesses and cages of speech are necessary for poetry to exist at all, yet McKay insists upon discretion and the acknowledgment of human limitation. Calvino praises a use of language that "enables us to approach things (present or absent) with discretion, attention, and caution, with respect for what things (present or absent) communicate without words" - a quotation that, in a literary blindfold test, many a reader might guess was from McKay's book of essays, Vis à Vis.

For Calvino, a work of literature is itself a form of concentrating exactness, in which "the existent crystallizes into a form, acquires a meaning - not fixed, not definitive, not hardened into mineral immobility, but alive as an organism." That sentence helps describe a central quality of McKay's poems: the way they combine, on the one hand, structural integrity and crystallizing shape and, on the other hand, a sense of being not so much a well-wrought urn as a highly individualized, inimitable phenomenon or organism. In searching for a way of appreciating the visiblity and exactness of the world, the poem itself becomes an exact but mobile thing.

         QUICKNESS

In my hour of darkness
In my time of need
Oh Lord, grant me vision
Oh Lord, grant me speed
       - Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris

Don McKay's poems are drawn to the exhilarations of speed. They hear the song of the Blackburnian warbler - "zip zip zip zip zeee / chickety chickety chickety chick" ("'The Bellies of Fallen Breathing Sparrows'" B). They admire the fast executions of nighthawks over a baseball field, who "flash past the floodlights effortlessly / catching flies: way to / dip, pick, snag that sucker" ("Softball" SD). Without a full stop, McKay's brief poem "Dreamskaters" (B) pulls into thirteen lines the speeds of skaters, swallows, scissors, writing, and hawks. Outdoor skaters are "chasing chance with all the moves / of swallows swirling to / connect," their actions likened to those of the poet who just has "time to scribble you this note then / scisssor and wheel syncromesh to long / parabolas of sense." The skaters' "stroke, stroke" is a metaphor for the poet's fleeting utterance, and the phrase "tossed off phrases" refers to both the skaters' actions and the poet's words. Another poem, "Our Last Black Cat" (B), celebrates a cat's restlessness, his "flowing / into motion," his becoming "the shadow of another cat / he couldn't catch." At the poem's end, McKay wryly notes how attempts to capture the cat's mischief and energy can only fall short of its kinetic exuberance: "Now we lock him up in memory under lithe: / flexible limber pliant supple: / stiff with attributes."

As Huisinga suggests in his classic study Homo Ludens, speed is found in play, play in speed: "the word ['play'] comes from the Anglo-Saxon plega, plegan meaning primarily 'play' or 'to play,' but also rapid movement, a gesture, a grasp of hands, clapping, playing a musical instrument and all kinds of bodily activity." Yet we hardly need Huisinga to make the connection: children playing tag or racing on tricycles, or otters whizzing down a mud slide, demonstrate the play-speed relationship. In Six Memos, Calvino quotes Leopardi on the satisfactions of going fast, the degree to which it's "pleasurable in itself; that is, for the vivacity, the energy, the strength, the sheer life of such a feeling." In talking of speed as a characteristic of style, Leopardi speaks of how speed and conciseness "please us because they present the mind with a rush of ideas that are simultaneous, or that follow each other so quickly that they seem simultaneous;" he even goes so far as to speak of the "power of poetic style" as "largely the same thing as rapidity." (As we'll see, however, McKay's poetry reflects the powers of slow pacing as well as those of rapidity.)

To increase speed McKay sometimes drops punctuation and simply runs sentences into one another to jump from perception to perception, association to association, but even when he paces with punctuation, speed can still be appealing in itself. In "Chickadee Encounter" (A), which begins with the impatient or amused exclamation "ok ok ok ok," the poet "may be glum or dozy" but is spurred into eloquence by the flurry and busyness of chickadees:

         it's practically pauseless,
but as though some big machine -
domestication maybe - hiccuped,
a glitch through which the oceanic
thirsts of poetry pour: o
zippers, quicklings,
may you inherit the earth, may not
perch at the edge of the shipwreck of state,
on the scragged, uneconomical alders,
and chat.

Surprise follows surprise - domestication compared to a machine, the hiccup, the "glitch"/"which" rhyme and the "zippers"/"quicklings" assonance, the "tidbits" of chickadees associated with something "oceanic," the Biblical allusion directed at the birds, the twisting of the cliché "ship of state," the final line's abrupt simplicity. The speed of such surprises, the eagerness and unpredictablity, often give the poems a hard-to-resist energy. In an essay about Colleen Thibaudeau written many years ago, Don and Jean McKay said the "experience of reading Thibaudeau can be a lot like laughing, not because of humorous content, but because the way they move is a constant surprise .... [She has] the ability to move with catspeed about varieties of linguistic experience." It's easy to recycle those words as a description of much of Don McKay's own poetry.

Despite his taste for the zippy and the swift, McKay also knows how slow the creative process can be. A poem called "Preamble" from his early collection Lightning Ball Bait begins:

Let it be said, he
thought, and left his shovel standing like the former
minister of holes and piles, sat back
against a poplar, drew his spiral notebook
from his pocket, let it be said he
slowly, counterclockwise, mows his own mind
and rakes it,
carries off the clippings to his compost pile ....

Those lines comically depict the poet setting aside physical work to jot down notes, but as the title indicates, the poem is more about preparation than about artistic action. The words "let it be said" occur four times in the poem, as if the poet were repeatedly about to burst into a lyric, but repeatedly fails to. In this instance, inspiration is far from mercurial.

Slowness, however, isn't just a source of comedy. Here is Calvino again, from his lecture "Quickness": "this apologia for quickness does not presume to deny the pleasures of lingering.... From my youth on, my personal motto has been the old Latin tag, Festina lente, hurry slowly." In McKay also we find such doubleness. His poems include not only the speed of "Dreamskaters" but also the methodical motions of "Night Skating on the Little Paddle River" (NF), in which the skaters move with "[s]low / fits" and "circulate as cautious / ceremonious bats" and sense, in the midst of their slow circulations, the afflictions of mortality: "Some may glimpse a lost one / in the spaces between skaters or the watchers, / elderly or pregnant, / by the bonfire." The aged and the pregnant, observant and physically slowed-down, aren't seen as inferior in any way to the skaters. In "The Poem, To Be Slow As Evening" (B) - the title itself contrasting sharply to the emphasis on speed in other McKay poems - words "will learn stand and stand and / lift and cradle" and emulate "the patient / animal of evening." That passage underlines how a healthy stasis is something to "learn," as well as something that can become nurturing, cradling. And cradling can be connected to home: "Home. Which is the sound of time / braking a little, growing slow and thick as the soup / that simmers on the stove. Abide, / abode" ("Homing" AG). The very sounds of those lines - in the clustering of "s"s, the rhymes of "growing slow" and "Abide, / abode," the patterning of "o"s from "Home" to "growing" to "stove" to "abode" - enact the braking of time, the metaphor of soup that simmers rather than boiling furiously.

In McKay's world, then, on-the-go speeds alternate with slow momentum. "Three Eclogues" and much of "Matériel," for instance, are more digressive, expansive, and slower-paced than the brief "songs" (e.g., "Song for the Song of the Wood Thrush," "Song for the Song of the Coyote") scattered throughout McKay's most recent two collections. More successfully than his awkward younger self in "To Danceland" (A) being coached by his mother to dance - "doing the jerk-step while she tried to slow, slow, quick quick / slow" - McKay's poems are artfully paced; they combine, in the words of a Gram Parsons and Emmylou Harris song, "vision" and "speed." They show what it means to be at once attentive and energetic, provoking and exhilarating. Festina lente.

         LIGHTNESS
The first pure color applied
Like a word at last released ...
The first music played as if
To escape the heaviness of air.
         - André Verdet, "Away from the Edge and Towards"

Don't bear me ill will, speech, that I borrow weighty words,
then labor heavily so that they may seem light.
         - Wislawa Szymborska, "Under One Small Star"

Just as Calvino finds slowness and quickness necessary companions, he finds that "we would be unable to appreciate the lightness of language if we could not appreciate language that has some weight to it." He notes that Medusa's blood was the source of Pegasus, the winged horse, "the heaviness of stone ... transformed into its opposite," and that after cutting off Medusa's head Perseus doesn't abandon it but keeps it in a bag: "he carries the reality within him and accepts it as his particular burden." One of Calvino's most concise descriptions of linguistic lightness is a kind of language "in which subtle and imperceptible elements are at work," sometimes taking the form of a "high degree of abstraction." Despite the abstractness, however, lightness "goes with precision and determination, not with vagueness and the haphazard." That's a useful description of the language of many McKay poems, especially in Another Gravity, in which the "degree of abstraction" is perhaps higher than in his previous collections, yet combined with a sense of earthbound existence and dense materiality.

In a poem from Birding, or desire, "Dusk," we find one of the many dramas of heaviness and lightness in McKay's poetry. The poem begins with "the slow / rollover of evening, the spruce / growing dense, growing dark," and within nine lines the poem builds up to a climax, "We become weight - " the dash followed by a sudden switch into the poem's final three lines: "until the balance tips entirely and a bat / breaks out like a butterfly's subconscious flashing, / dancing his own black rag." When the slowness and density referred to in the first stanza suddenly face their opposites, the creature that tips the balance away from "weight" isn't what we might expect - isn't, say, a pale butterfly flitting, but a more substantial thing, a bat likened to "a butterfly's subconscious," dancing and black. There's a certain weight in the bat's lightness, even suggested in the three strong accents concluding the poem: "own black rag." This is one of many instances in McKay's work where weight and lightness work together rather than apart.

Weight, then, isn't always a negative in McKay's poetry. At the end of "Whiteout: For the Fallen Poplars" (NF), when someone wakes up in stages and finally becomes fully conscious with the crash of falling trees outside, "the light becomes opaque / and floods the frame // and has weight." The weight of that light appears to provide longed-for clarity. This isn't to deny that McKay's poems often express the desire to be light rather than heavy. "Feathers" (B) imagines "If we grew such bits / of laughter on our bodies we'd enjoy // a finer intimacy with the air, / a tax break." "Without A Song"(SD) recalls a time when "lyric poetry was naturalism," when even single words - "simoon / chinook / sirocco / pindar / harmattan / mistral" - "made wing / of heavy objects, lifting gravity / and eating it." On the other hand, the poem goes on to say "No one / can afford to believe this" and to lament "There is so much information on the air / it scarcely gets off the ground." That contrast between wished-for lightness and the intransigent heaviness is also felt in "Meditation on a Small Bird's Skull" (NF), in which the skull's smallness and lightness attract the poet, so much so that even the word "skull" seems too heavy: "'skull' / clobbers this / lighter-than-air variation / on the egg." But when the poet confesses that he feels an urge to stick one end of the skull in his ear, "hoping for some / secret of the air," he admits that the skull's exquisite lightness may be too subtle for human ears: "We are big and blunt and easily fooled and know few / of the fine points of translation."

In "Song for Beef Cattle" (A), heaviness is associated with being earthbound in negative senses, with a kind of death-in-life. The cattle are "continents completely / colonized" and - in a darkly comic twist on a line from Hamlet - "too too / solid flesh making its slow / progress toward fast food." With their "heavy heads," the only sound they make is "a bellow / which extinguishes the wolf, the long arc of its howl / reduced to gravity." We would be mistaken, however, to think size always equates with heaviness. In "Big Alberta Clouds" (A), clouds may be likened to "dangerous brains ... hung across the sky" and "scare people into being weather-wise," but there's also a lightness to them:

         Clarity
attends them and great weight
withheld. Oscar Peterson plays "In the Wee Small Hours"
with such softness in such power
and vice versa. Look:
here comes the camel, the whale, the kleenex ....

Massiveness and lightness, McKay sees, aren't necessarily opposed; cloud shapes can suggest both whales and kleenexes. (The appearance of Oscar Peterson - a large man with at times a light touch - reminds me of a passage from Monk, Laurent de Wilde's book about a more radically innovative jazz pianist: "Only Monk could give such a sense of balance with so much weight. He seemed to defy the laws of gravity. He could make density dance.")

The passages about lightness and heaviness quoted so far from McKay all come from his collections up to 1997, but in his 2000 collection, Another Gravity, he took on the contrast as a central theme for a whole book. In his lecture "Lightness," Calvino speaks of "a visual image of lightness that acquires emblematic value," such as a character in a Boccaccio story leaping over a tombstone, or Don Quixote poking his lance through a windmill's sail and being lifted into the air, or Baron von Munchausen being carried off by ducks. The first poem in Another Gravity climaxes with just such an image: while shingling a boathouse roof, on a dare someone "r[a]n off into the sky," taking a flying leap from the roof toward a nearby lake. For McKay that rash action is emblematic, both in the way it connects to later poems in the book that feature the figure of Icarus or deal with flight off the earth (note the titles "Lift," "Glide," "Hover") and in the way it connects to the first poem's introductory lines. That poem begins by expressing how "voice" sometimes wants to escape itself, how poetry aches to get back to a power prior to language:

... in the midst of making sense or conversation, it will
harken back to breath, or even farther,
to the wind, and recognize itself
as troubled air, a flight path still
looking for its bird.

In such a passage, there's something inherently heavy about language, which is seen as postdating the lightness of pre-speech breath. What Calvino calls "the weight, the inertia, the opacity of the world" and likens to "a slow petrification" manifests itself in McKay's poetry as what one enters after "the sudden fall from myth / to politics and history" ("Running Away" AG), or what Icarus escapes when he lifts "out of the story and into the song"("Icarus" AG). Myth and song in Another Gravity are associated with lightness, air, flight, freedom. The book's final poem, "On Leaving" (AG), talks of changing homes and leaving behind a great deal, lightening one's load: "Choose a few companions of no weight - / a crow feather found in the parking lot, / the strawsmell of her hair, a few / books of the dead, 1000 / Best Loved Puns." Puns, the poem implies, are "of no weight" - yet the number "1000" ironically throws a heavy effect into the mix. Another example of McKay's sensitivity to the lightness-heaviness contrast, "Drag" (AG), ends:

unlike Horned Larks, who are imagination,
I was mostly memory which,
though photogenic and nutritious, rich
with old-time goodness, is notoriously
heavier than air.

The voice of that poem opposes "light" imagination to "heavy" memory, yet there are times in McKay's work when memory itself feeds imagination - times when his poems suggest the value of Dante's apostrophe in The Purgatorio (translated by Calvino in "Visibility"): "O imagination...what is the source of the visual images that you receive, if they are not formed from sensations deposited in the memory?" The title poem of Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night, for one example, demonstrates that memory in McKay's poetry isn't inherently "heavy." Moreover, the force of gravity is, after all, sometimes a welcome thing. "Drag" (AG) calls it "that irresistible embrace."

"As soon as the moon appears in poetry," Calvino says in "Lightness," "it brings with it a sensation of lightness, suspension."Another connection between Calvino's lecture and Another Gravity is the way in which both associate the moon with lightness. "When I began thinking about these lectures," Calvino writes, "I wanted to devote one whole talk to the moon, to trace its apparitions in the literature of many times and places." When Calvino speaks of Cyrano de Bergerac's fascination with ways for getting to the moon, he says that "the sluggishness of the human consciousness in emerging from its anthropocentric parochialism can be abolished in an instant by poetic invention." The first part of that quotation might elicit the answer "McKay" in a blindfold test, even if McKay's faith in poetry's ability to overcome our hubristic projections is qualified, less sure than the latter half of the Calvino quotation.

"Once past the street lights I miss it," McKay begins his poem "Dark of the Moon" (AG), "'poised' at the spruce tip, 'floating' / in the pond, the way it gathered longing into moths / and kept reality from overdosing on its own sane / self." In such lines the moon is (punningly) light, a source of welcome unreality and lunacy, helping keep us from becoming drugged by an excess of the mundane and the dully sane. Likewise, "Before the Moon" (AG) imagines a prior, moon-less time when the sun "owned / all the media" and "Whatever a thing was, / that was it, no ifs or / airspace." Without a moon, McKay imagines, "there was no leaving home, and so / no dwelling in it either," no "sweet tug / toward our manic possibilities," "no alcohol / and film" "no imagination," and - in a poem that is in part, discreetly, a love poem - no "you" tucking a stray wisp of hair across her cheek. Like the beef cattle bred for one thing and one thing only, "Place was obese," and the lightness and "second gravity" of the moon were not around to bestow the blessing of lightness upon the world.

       MULTIPLICITY

I never saw so much mud. I counted seven different type
muds. You couldn't imagine how many different kinds
of mud. That's what a detective has to be interested in.
Green mud and black mud, wet mud and dry mud, old
mud and new mud. I bring the samples home.
       - Lieutenant Columbo, in Columbo

In the last of his completed Charles Eliot Norton lectures, Calvino notes the paradox in the term "open encyclopedia," since the unmodified noun "etymologically implies an attempt to exhaust knowledge of the world by enclosing it in a circle." The word "attempt" starts to give the game away, since Calvino goes on to say that exhaustive knowledge is in fact an impossibility: "today we can no longer think in terms of a totality that is not potential, conjectural, and manifold." In Don McKay's poetry, we recognize what might seem like a desire for encyclopediac knowledge of nature's multifariousness, yet that encyclopedia must remain open, unfinished and unfinishable. McKay sometimes slyly jokes about human illusions of comprehensiveness, such as in the titles of two poems found in different collections, "Kinds of Blue #76 (Evening Snow)" (A) and "Kinds of Blue #41 (Far Hills)" (AG) - the joke being that the reader will look through McKay's poetry in vain to find the other 74 kinds of blue.

Is it clear why, when I watched the episode of Columbo quoted above, I thought of Don McKay? Listing is a common poetic device to evoke multiplicity, and McKay uses it generously, with variety and gusto. The listing may be of things chased by his dog Luke - "car bike jogger snowplow (caught, tossed in an / otter's arc of snow) rabbit motorcycle train the wind" (that list too fast to even bother with commas) ("Luke & Co." NF). It may be a prose-poem catalogue of a wasted encampment's abandoned medicines, quickly mounting into comedy ("gargling oil, wizard oil, Bromo Selzer, aspirin, anacin excedrin tylenol, Lydia Pinkham's Vegetable Compound cured my female weaknesses, Kicakoo Sagwa and Indian Salve, Dr. Redwing's Mexican Herbs of Joy for heart disease, diabetes, piles," etc.) ("Nostra" NF). Or it may compile different kinds of paths, as in "To Speak of Paths" (A). Above all, the lists enumerate species of living things; they help flesh out William James's statement in A Pluralistic Universe that "Nature ... is above all things multifarious." The first page of McKay's "Migratory Patterns" (B) cites Marsh hawk, Kestrels, Sharp-shins, Red tails, and Broadwings. "The Many Breasted Warbler" (B) hears "Black and white, Yellow, / possibly Bay breasted Warblers, Redstarts," where even a possibly heard species is given space (I wonder if McKay is the first poet to record, unRomantically, a birder's merely tentative identification). Another poem, which finds "bindweed, spiderweb, sumac, / Queen Anne's lace," speaks for many poems when McKay talks of "attempting to become / a dog's nose of receptiveness."

A hike described in "Black Spruce" (NF) finds the hikers identifying Naked Mitrewort, Pale Corydalis, Bluebeard Lily, and other species of flowers. Listing becomes a kind of short-hand, a gesture toward multiplicity, yet in itself it isn't sufficient. Description eventually returns - the Mitrewort has "petals then meta-petals in a sort of / cross" - as it does in "Sunday Morning, Raisin River"(A), when the rapid mentions of Blue Vervain, Joe Pye Weed, Autumn Wild Onion, and Arrowhead are followed by "Wild Grape, looping limb to stem to / fallen log, tapestry / and jungle." In "Black Spruce" (NF) the hiker specifies that he and his friends, field-guide in hand, don't physically snap or uproot the flowers; instead, "we pick it from the flower book to carry in our / heads." The book isn't seen as an intrusive sign of power hunger and manipulation-by-labelling but as, among other things, an aid towards appreciating a wide variety of species and a means of avoiding the actual plucking of flowers. The crucial acts are of observation, and of planting the image of a flower in memory, though in the end the flower imaginatively "picked" is the image in the book, not the actual flower in all its unknowability.

Richard Wilbur once gave a lecture entitled "Poetry and Happiness," in which he talked much about the listing, cataloguing impulse in poetry, an impulse fed by an attraction to multiplicity. Wilbur noted how a poet's eye (or ear or nose) for multiplicity "makes us feel vicariously alert," helps us "exult in ... instant designation," "implies a vast reservoir of other things that might just as well have been mentioned," and expresses "a longing to possess the whole world, and to praise it, or at least to feel it." McKay's fascination with a multiplicity of beings - avian and floral, especially - helps create in us the feelings, exaltations, and longings that Wilbur spoke of, even if it's clear from many passages in his poetry and prose that McKay would balk at a phrase like "possess the whole world," since for him the greatest glory of particulars is when they ultimately slip away from our impositions and cannot be truly possessed.

***

In "Lines to a Movement from Mozart's E-Flat Symphony," Thomas Hardy wrote a number of flamboyantly alliterative lines, including "to such freshness, fairness, fulness, fineness, freeness," and "to such rashness, ratheness, rareness, ripeness, richness." Pick out six of Hardy's words - for instance, freshness, fineness, freeness, rashness, rareness, richness - and you have another handy set of terms for re-reading and savouring Don McKay's poetry. Reader, now it's your turn.

***

The primary sources for this essay are Italo Calvino's Six Memos for the Next Millennium (Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988) and the poetry collections of Don McKay:

A = Apparatus (Toronto McClelland and Stewart, 1997).
AG = Another Gravity (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 2000).
B = Birding, or desire (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1983).
LBB = Lightning Ball Bait (Toronto: Coach House, 1980).
LS = Long Sault (London, Ontario: Applegarth Follies 1975).
NF = Night Field (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1991).
SD = Sanding Down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1987).

Other sources include Don and Jean McKay, "Colleen Thibaudeau's Elastic Moment," Brick 5 (Winter 1979); Laurent De Wilde, Monk, trans. Jonathan Dickinson (New York: Marlowe, 1997); Thomas Hardy, The Collected Poems of Thomas Hardy (London: MacMillan, 1926); Johan Huisinga, Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play-Element in Culture (1950. Boston: Beacon, 1955); William James, Writings, 1902-1910 (New York: Library of America, 1987); Wislawa Szymborska, View With a Grain of Sand: Selected Poems, trans. Stanislaw Barañcsak and Clare Cavanagh (San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1995); André Verdet, Chagall's World: Reflections from the Mediterranean (Garden City: Doubleday, 1984); Richard Wilbur, Responses: Prose Pieces, 1953-1976 (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976); "In My Hour of Darkness," originally recorded in 1973, and most readily available on Gram Parsons, GP/Grevious Angel (Reprise Records, 1990); and Grand Deceptions, season 8, episode 4 (1989), Columbo (Script: Sy Salkowitz).