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Barry McKinnon's most recent collection, The Centre, Poems 1970-2000, represents thirty years of writing, starting from his home base of Prince George, British Columbia in 1970, a year after he'd moved from Vancouver to teach at the newly-opened College of New Caledonia. Ottawa writer and publisher jwcurry once described McKinnon's poetry as the first half of any piece moving toward one central line, and the second half moving away from it. Subtitled "The Centre: Moving North," McKinnon himself places the collection in his territory of Prince George, as it was there that his formative years as a poet ended, and he came finally into his own. It seems telling that one of his publications after heading north was the chapbook The Death of a Lyric Poet (Poems & Drafts) (Caledonia Writing Series, 1975), as he ended one consideration and began another, drifting away from the shorter lyric to the longer open sequence. But for the rough notes (literally "drafts" of some of the finished pieces), he includes the collection as a whole.

The death of a lyric
poet is living here

at the end of the line
      (p 27, Living Here)

Working in the poetic tradition of the procedural open-form, Barry McKinnon's poetry is finely tuned and honed, where the craft is there, but it's the movement that represents. As he said in 1983 (in an interview with Don Precosky in Essays in Canadian Writing #32, Summer 1986), "For me, writing sort of accompanies what I do. I do write very quickly and I don't spend a lot of physical or literal time at it. For me it's a process of waiting for it to happen." You can see it in various pieces such as "Thoughts Driving," that writes "onward up the road, it is you again driving some 10 / year path -"(p 95), or the short piece "Cabin: early morning/June," "not miserable / but a sense of the end of things // - the baby wakes / singing - " (p 94). Even his previous publication titles, used as section titles, suggest the drift: The Death of a Lyric Poet: (Poems & Drafts); The the. (Fragments; and The Centre (An Improvisation). It's as though McKinnon works through a deliberate incompletion, moving and moving further out in each piece until there is nowhere else for him to go, writing lines precisely cut to further a deliberate whole.

Included in this selection are pieces and sections from most of his previous trade collections, including the Governor-General's award nominated The the. (Coach House Press, 1980), Pulp Log (Caitlin Press, 1991) and The Centre (Caitlin Press, 1995) as well as from numerous of his chapbooks and broadsides, including The Death of a Lyric Poet, Sex at Thirty One, Sex at 38 and Arrhythmia. One piece that isn't included, glaring in its omission, is the poem I Wanted To Say Something, published originally by McKinnon through his Caledonia Writing Series in 1975, and reissued by Red Deer College Press in 1990. Something that could easily have not been included for the sake of its length, and considered an influencial and essential poem in McKinnon's ouvre, as writing his family's history in a long poem of the prairie west. As poet Andrew Suknaski writes in the "Foreward" from the later edition, "And wherever I went with Wood Mountain Poems, Barry's poem was a beacon for me." Crediting McKinnon's piece with influencing his own work, as well as Sid Marty's Tumbleweed Harvest, Robert Kroetsch' Seed Catalogue and Eli Mandel's Out of Place, Suknaski ends with, "The simple truth is ... prairie poetry would have been far different and poor without McKinnon's I Wanted To Say Something. A lot of us would have been a while longer in getting back home inside that place called the long poem."

The shape of this current collection, then, surrounds quite obviously around Barry McKinnon's geography and writing in Prince George: "it is not to get wood only, but to / be so quiet they'll never know you're gone" (p 67, Birch). The collection shapes itself there, such as in this poem referencing the dead logging town Giscome, that starts:

         Giscome     shack town, no more
Saturday nights there. one man remains
            (p. 20, Bayday)

to the poem "Pearl," that writes:

I know everything & ponder the mysteries
of the Prince George Hotel: dark, 4:30 PM ponder
the imported Vegas singer - what does he think of it
the town, where someone sd everyone seems to be missing a
finger & has a split mouth from an authentic drunken fight.
            (p. 22)

In the same interview, McKinnon talks of I Wanted To Say Something, written so soon after he arrived north, and the ending placed in the present he never ended up writing: "So the third part was to take up this bleak, depressed feeling I had about ending up at the beginning of the 1970s in this northern mill town where everybody seems hostile and against any of this so-called sensitivity to the world." It reads almost as though the "last lyrics" he wrote afterward, in the section he begins with, "The Death of a Lyric Poet: (Poems & Drafts)," were part of this same feeling, opening up from the suggestion (brought forward by George Bowering, among others) that you can no longer write lyrics once you enter your thirties.

to own nothing becomes
achievement

a kind of ownership
not to care
            (p. 15, The North)

Not to say that this is simply a book of the north, of simple geography, but written from that north, inhabiting McKinnon's sensibilities. Other pieces in the collection include the series "Arrhythmia" (meaning "irregular heartbeat," a series that as a Gorse Press chapbook won the bpNichol chapbook award in 1994) and the ongoing "sex at thirty-one" series, written every seven years from the age of thirty-one, begun in the 1970s by McKinnon, Brian Fawcett and Pierre Coupey, and written by so many others. In The Centre: Poems 1970-2000, McKinnon only includes his "Sex at 31" and "Sex at thirty-eight" sequences (he claims not to have finished a "sex at 45," but his "sex at 52" appeared in the self-published - a walk in 1998). There is so much of McKinnon writing his life and mortality in his poetry, especially in both "Arrhythmia" and the "sex at 31" series, which are built from an almost inflated sense of mortality.

An example of how the two sides blended together seamlessly was in the collection Pulp Log (A Poem in 59 Parts), the winner of the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Award in 1991 (as part of the BC Book Prizes) and included here in full. Pulp Log is a poem on Prince George itself, and McKinnon's feelings and observations on that, a log book in fifty-nine parts on the northern logging town.

my work is time and displacement of energy. this is nothing bad, this is nothing good. I am writing this so Barry McKinnon will understand,- therefore the stinking, or too high grade. say it's only a job, it's only your life - and it might be going out the window, into the October fog, - the euphemistic inversion of white mill cloud that I cussed last night until someone said, would you rather live in Bangladesh?
            (p 146, eleven/fifty-nine, Pulp Log)

As he writes in "The Centre (An Improvisation," the title poem to both collections of that name:

( the task: to make visible the farm, the heart, the centre

[...]

in the centre, know. they think this a last or beginning
chance - and what you learn: the labyrinth of the dream - work,
         as in the old days - never seeming ending. the dutiful will miss
it, those who don't, take a chance, make themselves an edge:

     the grammar machine unto itself. only humans
in trouble: it is all human - (what we cover up
                 when the centre falls apart
                     (p 113-4)