Vis a Vis | Fieldnotes on Poetry & Wilderness
by Don McKay

October 2001 | Books & reading | $14.95 CAN | $14.95 US
1894031504 | 9781894031509 | Trade Paper

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.

Author Biography

Don McKay has published nine books of poetry, two of which, Nightfield (1991) and Another Gravity (2000), won Governor General's Literary Awards. He has taught creative writing at University of Western Ontario and University of New Brunswick. McKay is presently the associate director for poetry at the Banff Centre for the Arts. He lives in British Columbia.

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