An angular unconformity is a border between two rock sequences, one lying at a distinct angle to the other, which represents a significant gap — often millions of years — in the geologic record. (Imagine a biography that has several decades simply unaccounted for.) It might also be described as a fissure through which deep time leaks into history and upsets its authority.

Angular Unconformity shows us a life’s work in cross-section, a restless and humane intelligence, ever searching, ever shifting, finding significance in our blink-of-an-eye existence against a backdrop of geological time unimaginable in its scale.

A shrewd observer of teh sounds and the poetics of nature, Don McKay attunes his senses to bird song and music, to human presence and geological formations, to vernacular speech and inanimate silence. In his eloquent, yet exuberant encountes with the wilderness, he walks the fault line between the known and the unknown, testing the uncertain mechanism of language and its imperfect gestures toward meaning.

This first comprehensive collection of Don McKay’s poetry displays this pre-eminent Canadian poet’s gift for thinking through metaphor, for channelling a profound philosophical discourse through poetic imagery. In poem after poem, his disciplined attention and contemplative mind break through the commonplace, illuminating an ecological understanding of the world as it is.

“This book is as compassionate as it is essential. Essential at the very least because it collects poetry that has been out of print and thus difficult to access for readers, teachers, and students. Further, this book of collected poems is essential because McKay has been a significant voice in Canadian poetry for the past three decades.”
– Canadian Literature