Apparatus

“There’s a place / between desire and memory, some back porch / we can neither wish for nor recall,” writes Don McKay in Apparatus. The poems in this collection home in on that place – those keenly desired places – where language will not reach. Apparatus is Don McKay’s first collection of new poems since his 1991 award-winning Night Field. It is a passionate engagement with nature and a powerful critique of human assaults on wilderness which, for McKay, is more than unsubdued nature; it is whatever eludes the mind’s categories – the insoluble secret of life itself. To read McKay’s poems is to be in touch with the significant concerns of our time and all time. McKay is a poet of unmatched linguistic playfulness, with virtuoso flexibility of voice and an ability to shape-shift through forms, tones, and styles.