Deactivated West 100

by Don McKay

Deactivated West 100 is Don McKay’s latest set of variations on a poetics of place. Armed with lunch and relevant reading material, McKay invites us to join him on Vancouver Island for a series of explorations that depend on first losing our way. In the spirit of Vis à Vis (Gaspereau Press, 2001), McKay embarks on a project to locate a human understanding of place in the midst of wilderness and in the scheme of infinite time. In six movements of prose and poetry, questions are clarified and answers begun. Home is a series of habits, McKay suggests, as he recounts a personal tradition that involves selecting a stone from a local beach, familiarizing himself with it over the years, and then returning it from his pocket to the same beach and selecting a new one. Picking up the discussion of place and wilderness that began in Vis à Vis , McKay launches it in a new direction, headlong into the geologic/geopoetic time scale where crystals, magma, terranes and Xenophanes affirm an understanding of how we inhabit space and time. At the centre of the collection is a series of poems dedicated to the Shay locomotive, which powered Vancouver Island’s logging industry in the 1920s. Here the natural and the built coexist, mental and geographical locations intersect, and wilderness and creativity border. These poems are followed by a set of journeys made for the purpose of losing the way and a treatise on natural clearings. On the ground, McKay is both precise and imaginative, pursuing the specific interstices where abstractions leak into the forest, and walks follow creeks into wilder, less habitable areas of thought. “The background for Deactivated West 100 is a particular fault line on southern Vancouver Island known as the Loss Creek-Leech River fault,” says McKay. “It is very eloquent because it is marked on the surface by a deep canyon–at least at its western end, in which Loss Creek, the Leech River and a couple of reservoirs lie. I decided, as part of my apprenticeship to west coast landscapes, to walk the fault line from end to end and take note of whatever it presented to me in terms of rocks, plants, animals, birds (of course) and human history. A lot of that walking was done on the old deactivated bush road which follows Loss Creek and gives the book its title. Since the area has been very aggressively logged, this also led me into the history and politics of forestry hereabouts–including technological advances like the Shay locomotive and the Stihl chainsaw, both of whom make appearances in the book.” Deactivated West 100 proceeds with the same mix of humour, humility and determined authenticity that have characterized McKay’s previous works. At a pace that falls somewhere between stroll and clamber, McKay introduces a potent set of ideas with which to situate ourselves in the woods. This book is a smyth-sewn paperback bound in card stock with a letterpress-printed jacket. The text was typeset by Andrew Steeves in Electra and printed offset on laid paper.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

112 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2005

About the author

Don McKay is an award-winning Canadian poet, editor, and educator.

McKay was educated at the University of Western Ontario and the University of Wales, where he earned his PhD in 1971. He taught creative writing and English for 27 years in universities including the University of Western Ontario and the University of New Brunswick.

In June 2007, he won the Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip (2006). He is the co-founder and manuscript reader for Brick Books, one of Canada's leading poetry presses, and was editor of the literary journal The Fiddlehead from 1991-96.

In 2008, he was made a Member of the Order of Canada.[2]

Reviews

[Madison Deppe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very beautiful and wonderfully, simply satisfying.

[Rowan Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this book for a university course. It was (and is) my favourite book from that course. Don McKay (who, I want to address, pronounces his last name as “Mc-Eye” for reasons I’m not sure any native English speaker can identify) weaves a strange sort of tapestry, the likes of which I had never seen before. Deactivated West 100 contains autobiography, fiction, verse poetry and prose poetry, and pays careful, caring attention to the characteristics idiosyncratic of Vancouver Island, and those idiosyncratic to the world. He discusses, for example, tectonic activity in the same way that other authors write about universalities of life: love, death, etc. But I think McKay gets at universalities much more faithfully.
Reading Deactivated West 100 is a bit like getting lost. You wander through the rainforests of Vancouver Island, the depths of the greatest fault line Earth has to offer, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the history of steam engines in British Columbia. McKay’s prose is beyond deft. He describes, like, basalt rock in terms both hellacious and accurate without substituting the poetry for the jargon, but using scientific nomenclature almost endearingly. And that thing about tectonic activity I mentioned above? He addresses geopoetics (which I had never heard of before) and, yeah, this part of the book stuck with me more than any other. Writing about place with specificity, before this book, held little appeal for me; now, it’s pretty much how I define a good book.
I’ll just note here that I think Don and I share some feelings about the logging industry in British Columbia, so I was propelled through the final section or two by this substance. However, if you’re a citizen of British Columbia in some capacity, I suggest that you read this book, but know that you may disagree with the content. McKay untangles some obdurate knots in the history of B.C. that previously, to my knowledge, remained largely forgotten behind some couch or other. But natural history, and his questioning of it, is what encouraged me to mark up the pages with marginalia such as “DAMN !!!!” It’s also what may encourage you to put the book down.