Paradoxides: Poems

(Paperback)

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Description

Multi-award-winning poet Don McKay returns with a startling collection of new poems, his first since his Griffin Poetry Prize winning book, Strike/Slip Don McKay is known, among other things, as Canada's foremost poet of the natural world. Readers have come to expect a playful extravagance in his poetry. Most recently, he has opened himself to the mysteries of geologic wonder. "Who needs ghosts when matter /nonchalantly haunts us," he writes. In his new book, perhaps his most stunning yet, it's fossils and deep time that provide the awe. The landscape of Newfoundland has taken his linguistic virtuosity even further, sharpened his wit, and given him a lyric energy that sometimes feels as if he's lifting the planet into song.

Reviews

Praise for Don McKay:

"These exuberantly musical and shrewd poems are ecological in the fullest sense of the word: they seek to elucidate our relationships with our fragile dwelling places both on the earth and in our own skins."
New York Times Book Review

"Don McKay walks us out to the uncertain ground between the known and unknown, between the names we have given things and things as they are. . . . McKay's meditations on time's evidence acquire a similar heft, proposing, in their discipline of mind and generosity of spirit, a way to be at home in the world. A book of patience, courage, and quiet eloquence."
Judges' citation, 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize (winner)

"He is an essential poet of our time. . . ."
Judges' citation, 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize

"Reading McKay is a heightened and altering experience; it changes my personal relationship with language and silence."
Toronto Star

Author Bio

DON McKAYis the multi-award-winning author of twelve books of poetry, most recently Paradoxides; Strike/Slip, winner of the Griffin Poetry Prize; and Camber- Selected Poems, a finalist for the Griffin Poetry Prize. McKay is also known as a poetry editor, and he has taught poetry in universities across the country. He presently lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.