The Griffin Poetry Prize is Canada's most generous poetry award. It was founded in 2000 by businessman and philanthropist Scott Griffin. The awards go to one Canadian and one international poet who writes in the English language. The winning poets receive $65,000 (Cdn) each and an additional $10,000 (Cdn) goes to each shortlisted poet who reads at the annual Griffin Poetry Prize Shortlist Readings in Toronto, Canada.
Don McKay, Griffin Poetry Prize 2007 Canadian Winner
Don McKay has published 10 previous works of poetry. He is the winner of two Governor General’s Literary Awards for Poetry for Night Field (1991) and Another Gravity (2000). He has been previously shortlisted twice for the Griffin Poetry Prize, first in 2001 for Another Gravity and in 2005 for Camber: Selected Poems, which was also named a Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year. In addition to being shortlisted in 2007, McKay’s new volume Strike/Slip has also been awarded the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize. Don McKay lives in British Columbia, Canada.
Judges’ Citation
“In Strike/Slip, 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. This is wonder’s territory, and from within it McKay considers a time ‘before mind or math’ before rock, in human hands, turned over in the mind, becomes stone. The poems confront the strangeness and inadequacy of using language to address the point at which language fails – the point where, ‘wild and incompetent, / you have no house’ – and suggest that in such an unsettled state we might truly pay attention. In McKay’s work, attention is the foundation of a poetics and an ethics in which otherness is respected, indeed cherished, for its ability to unhouse. But Strike/Slip also speaks to the intimacy of our relationships with time. How, at once metaphysical, practical, and intuitive, the weight of it is thought, felt in the body, and discerned in the landscape as sediment and growth, rust and erosion. 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, Strike/Slip manifests, like quartz, ‘Some act of pure attention … simple, naked, perilously perfect’.”
Summary
Don McKay walks the strike/slip fault between poetry and landscape, sticks its strange nose into the cold silence of geologic time, meditates on marble, quartz, and gneiss, and attends to the songs of ravens and thrushes, and the clamour of the industrialized bush. Behind these poems lies the urge to engage the tectonics of planetary dwelling with the rickety contraption of language, and to register the stress, sheer, and strain – but also the astonishment – engendered by that necessary failure.
Note: Summaries are taken from promotional materials supplied by the publisher, unless otherwise noted.
Don McKay reads Astonished / Petrified
Astonished / Petrified, by Don McKay
Astonished -
astounded, astonied, astunned, stopped short and turned toward stone, the moment filling with its slow stratified time. Standing there, your face cratered by its gawk, you might be the symbol signifying eon. What are you, empty or pregnant? Somewhere sediments accumulate on seabeds, seabeds rear up into mountains, ammonites fossilize into gems. Are you thinking or being thought? Cities as sand dunes, epics as e-mail. Astonished you are famous and anonymous, the border washed out by so soft a thing as weather. Someone inside you steps from the forest and across the beach toward the nameless all-dissolving ocean.
Petrified -
your heart’s tongue seized mid-syllable, caught by the lava flow you fled. Fixed, you stiffen in the arms of wonder’s dark undomesticated sister. Can’t you name her and escape? You are the statue that has lost the entrance into art, wild and incompetent, you have no house. Who are you? You are the crystal that picks up its many deaths. You are the momentary mind of rock.
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