Vis à Vis

In Vis à Vis, Don McKay charts a vision of poetics that keeps its feet on the ground and its eyes on the horizon. As one of Canada’s leading poets, McKay has long been known for his passionate engagement with his natural surroundings. This book collects three essays on this relationship, together with new and previously published poems that further demonstrate these ideas. Using bushtits, baler twine, Heidegger and Levinas, McKay sets out to explore some of the almost unspeakable concepts driving the use of language particular to poets, and the arguably skewed relationship human beings have with their natural surroundings.

In a book the Globe & Mail calls “stylishly constructed” and “impeccably casual,” one of Canada’s best-loved writers offers his own sense of poetics.

Finalist for the 2002 Governor General’s Award for Nonfiction.

AUTHOR

Don McKay

Don McKay is a poet, teacher, and editor. He has published more than a dozen books in a career that spans five decades. He has twice won the Governor General’s Literary Award for poetry, and won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip in 2007. His previous essay collections include the GG-shortlisted Vis à Vis: Field Notes on Poetry & Wilderness, Deactivated West 100, and The Shell of the Tortoise, winner of the 2011 BMO Winterset Award. McKay lives in St. John’s, Newfoundland.

Reviews

“Sinuously crafted and stylishly constructed, Vis à Vis contains a vibrant trio of McKay’s impeccably casual essays, as well as a generous selection of both new and previously published poems.” Judith Fitzgerald, Globe and Mail