Camber

by Don McKay

The poetry of Don McKay is renowned for its piquant wit, lyric emotion, and pitch-perfect vernacular music. His work has received national acclaim and the recognition of many awards, including the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, which he has won twice, and, most recently, from the prestigious and internationally known Griffin Poetry Prize, for which his most recent book was a finalist. Camber is the lilt in the physics of flight, the anti-gravitational alchemy of both wings and poetry. It is also at the heart of the poetry of Don McKay. Spanning three decades, and drawing on all of McKay’s major collections, this selection distills the essence of his craft and provides an overview of, and an ideal introduction to, the work to date of one of Canada’s most celebrated poets.

Genres: Poetry

226 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 16, 2004

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

[Katia]

We are not
a simple people and we fear
the same simplicities we crave.
No one wants to be a terminal
Canadian or existentialist or child, dumbly
moved because the clouds are bruises,

[Edita · Rating 3 out of 5]

For the following few seconds, while the ear
inhales the evening only the offhand is acceptable. Poetry
clatters. The old contraption pumping
iambs in my chest is going to take a break
and sing a little something. What? Not much. There’s
a sorrow that’s so old and silver it’s no longer
sorry. There’s a place
between desire and memory, some back porch
we can neither wish for nor recall.
*
Sometimes a voice – have you heard this? –
wants not to be voice any longer, wants something
whispering between the words, some
rumour of its former life. Sometimes, even
in the midst of making sense or conversation it will
hearken back to breath, or even farther,
to the wind, and recognize itself
as troubled air, a flight path still
looking for its bird.
*

To stand with mind akimbo where the wind
riffles the ridge. Slow,
slow jazz: it must begin
before the instrument with bones
dreaming themselves hollow and the dusk
rising in them like a sloth
ascending. Moon,
night after night rehearsing shades of pause
and spill, sifting into reed beds,
silvering the fine hairs on your arms, making
rhythm out of light and nothing, making
months. What have I ever made of life or it
of me, all I ever asked for was to be remembered
constantly by everything I ever touched.
*
Sometimes a voice – have you heard this? –
wants not to be voice any longer and this longing
is the worst of longings. Nothing
assuages.
[...] Nothing
assuages. Maybe it is singing
high in the cirque, burnishing itself
against the rockwall, maybe it is
clicking in the stones turned by the waves like faceless
dice. Have you heard this? – in the hush
of invisible feathers as they urge the dark,
stroking it toward articulation? Or the moment
when you know it’s over and the nothing which you
have to say is falling all around you, lavishly,
pouring its heart out.

[Sandra Bunting · Rating 4 out of 5]

I was unfamiliar with the work of Don McKay until I read Camber for a poetry course I am doing. I am so glad that I have been introduced to his poetry.
I found his poems clear with an interesting usage of language and a good amount of the surreal (which I love).The poems are grounded in the Canadian experience - snow, cabins and woods juxtaposed with more urban scenes such as concrete highways.
A wide selection of birds, musical instruments and dogs are regular references throughout the collection. This is a book I hope to go back to, to delve in more deeply.
Highy recommended.
Such a joy.

[Matthew Ledrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

A wonderfully haunting collection of poetry from a master poet. I have immense respect for poets, as its a field I cannot comprehend writing in the slightest. Kudos.

[M.W.P.M. · Rating 4 out of 5]

This selection includes poems from Birding, Or Desire and early poems, Sanding down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night , Night Field: Poems , Apparatus , and Another Gravity ...

From Birding, Or Desire and early poems...

The walnut turns granite
in fading light, the kids in silhouette
are winding up the tire swing to spin
one in it looking up, one on it
looking down, a brave new planet
torqued up to begin.

Behind the window I rehearse
how the earth will spin to chaos in his head, in hers
the slate sky swirl to a throat.
They pause, pure
potential in the jaws
of darkness poised to close, then

slow in the be
in the begin
in the beginning
in the engendering of energies that
rhymes them with their blurring world.

- The Tire Swing, pg. 36

From Sanding down This Rocking Chair on a Windy Night ...

"Mind bent around the inner ear,"
a foreign agent
round her short wave. Snap,
Crackle, Pop. No one
speaks her language, its soft paws
harden into anglo-Saxon hammer
anvil stirrup no gaps in this traffic.

*

If I were five hundred years ago,
Japanese, and gathered
I would not be talking with my teeth.
My tongue would feather a curve into the air: so:
I would leave you with the soft
end of the quill.

*

Uninhabited thin
winter light stares in each window
redefining edge.
From room to room inside these clothes inside
this skin: rented:
now I owe everything to the owls.

- Talk's End, pg. 65

From Night Field: Poems ...

The wind is struggling in her sleep, comfortless
because she is a giant,

which is not her fault. Whose idea was it
to construct a mind exclusively of shoulders?

In her dream
the car chase always overtakes the plot and wrecks it.

Maybe she will wake up
a Cecropia moth, still struggling

in a kimono of pressed-together dust
bearing the insignia of night.

Or as her own survivor, someone
who felt that huge wrench

clamped to her skull, loosening cutler and books,
whirling round her,

corps de ballet, then
exit every whichway,

curtain.

- Song for the Restless Wind, pg. 97

From Apparatus ...

For the following few seconds, while the ear
inhales the evening
only the offhand is acceptable. Poetry
clatters. The old contraption pumping
iambs in my chest is going to take a break
and sing a little something. What? Not much. There's
a sorrow that's so old and silver it's no longer
sorry. There's a place
between desire and memory, some back porch
we can neither wish for nor recall.

- Song for the Song of the Wood Thrush, pg. 125

From Another Gravity ...

Sometimes the eye brims
over with desire and pours
into its flight path:

this is gaze, and glide
is when the body follows,
flowing into river, when the heart,

turning the word "forever"
into plainsong,
learns to purr, knowing

the most important
lesson of grade four
is the blue but pointed

page, the pure wish that we
sharpen into dart and send
skimming the desks and out

the window, through the schoolyard
with its iron jungle gym, across
the traffic we must always

stop and look both
ways for, meanwhile, gazing
at us from its prehistoric perch, a small

but enterprising lizard
is about to launch intself
into the warm arms of the Mesozoic afternoon.

- Glide, pg. 184-185

[Angela · Rating 4 out of 5]

Camber is a wonderful reflection on the natural world and our place within it. Don McKay's poetry is full of unique metaphors, creative diction, and stunning attention to detail. Even the poems that I didn't love had something special about them; McKay's inventive use of language makes the familiar seem exotic.

that birds have sinuses throughout their bodies,
and that their bones are flutes
that soaring turkey vultures can detect
            depression and careless driving
that every feather is a pen, but living,

flying

(from "Field Marks," p. 3)

poems that I liked:

"Alias Rock Dove, Alias Holy Ghost," "Adagio for a Fallen Sparrow," "But Nature Has Her Darker Side," "Some functions of a leaf," "Bone Poems (VI. & VII.)," "Nocturne Macdonald-Cartier Freeway," "Waking at the Mouth of the Willow River," "Moth Fear," "Meditation on Shovels," "Song for Beef Cattle," "Camouflage," "Song for the song of the Wood Thrush," "Suddenly, at home," "Fork," "Lift," "Dark of the Moon," "Song for the song of the coyote," "Nocturnal Migrants," "UFO," "Finger Pointing at the Moon."

=21/126 (16.3%) poems that I liked.

[Bun Do · Rating 5 out of 5]

So so many great poems, each with its own unique story and beauty. 10/10 would recommend if you enjoy reflection poems about human coexistence with nature, themes of grief and loneliness, and the beauty of the mundane.

[kaelan · Rating 4 out of 5]

With the exception of my beloved Robert Kroetsch, Don McKay is probably the greatest, most skillful Canadian poet I've read thus far. And because Camber is a "collected works," spanning the last twenty-plus years of the poet's career, it allows one to gain an appreciation for the depth and versatility of his work. McKay tends to be placed in the eco-poetry camp (and with good reason), but he exercises an equally deft hand in the anthropological realm. Thus, although this collection contains its fair share of bird and nature poems, it also tackles such sundry topoi as jazz percussion ("Setting up the Drums"), automobiles ("Ode to My Car") and kitchen utensils ("Setting the Table").

However, McKay's most impressive strength as a poet lies in his genius for metaphor and comparison. For him, the simple act of turning on the kitchen faucet is imbued with magic and mystery: "an underground river leaps sixty feet into your mouth, a perfectly composed dream" ("Nocturne MacDonald-Cartier Freeway"). Elsewhere, a wintry sunset finds "evening […] bleeding inward from the bowl's edge, blue- / black with the heavy hint of snow" ("Midwintering"). And in "Kestrels," the heart is pertinently described as "that paraplegic bird." I'm of the belief that a successful metaphor makes a stereogram out of reality, forces the reader to apprehend the world in a way that is fresh and defamiliarizing. At his best, then, McKay tenders us a key with which to unlock the doors of perception.

Yet because of the density of this poetry, Camber's length—just over 200 pages—can be overwhelming. These poems are best taken slowly, so that there's time to digest them; unfortunately, the format of the "collected works" (voluminous, claustrophobic) isn't always best suited to such a mode of reading. For that reason, I'd like to check out some of the individual collections, like Night Field or Apparatus.

[Claire · Rating 4 out of 5]

Currently writing an essay on poems within this collection - it's absolutely brilliant (the poems, not my essay). I've barely even scratched the surface of all that could be said about this poetry. I absolutely love McKay's view of nature and the wilderness, it's quite different to anything I've come across thus far. His ideas about language - how we can never fully understand the true language of wilderness, and thus all our language is translation - is, I find, a quite optimistic view in contrast to postmodernism's common notion of language. He uses this idea brilliantly in his poetry, always self-consciously calling attention to the use of language in really unique and interesting ways.

I'm obviously bringing a lot from academic readings of his poetry into my review of it. From a personal, non-academic point of view, I still adore it. There's something so beautiful about his connection to nature, how he writes about home, and so many other things. I really felt quite a visceral attachment to some of these poems, particularly the ones the later collections. (I gave this 4/5 stars because the earlier poems didn't quite capture me as well as the later ones.)

Overall, fantastic poetry, which I think I'll be coming back to again and again.

[Ruby Nazaruk · Rating 2 out of 5]

Some of them i didn't like i didn't read all of them i questioned some of them others i just skipped a few i really liked but most of them weren't for me. This book isn't for everyone but if your interested feel free to read though some of them i found creepy.

I read it off and on this month

[Marg · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am writing my masters essay on mckay - I will probably learn more from this book than any other.

[Maya 維欣 · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Finish” date is just for show, I’ll be lingering over this collection for a long time. It’s delicious.