The Shell of the Tortoise: Four Essays & an Assemblage by Don McKay (review)

The rivers on the eastern side of central Vancouver Island – the Campbell, the Quinsam, the Oyster – come down from lakes set beneath the mountains and flow, by one route or another, into the waters of the Inside Passage. They are famous for their salmon and trout. Fishing was the cherished subject of Roderick Haig-Brown, the regional celebrant in whose former house Don McKay found himself thinking of Herakleitos, the ‘philosopher of flux.’ In The Shell of the Tortoise McKay writes engagingly about his travels and writerly habits, describing the effects, often unexpected, of matters bookish and worldly on his poetic investigations of time and place. Rivers prompt him to ponder what ‘sensors’ will measure their motion: ‘long-lined dithyrambic celebrations; or maybe blank verse would convey the weight of it, the gravitas; or maybe quick imagistic takes with lots of silences through which the flow might move.’ Or perhaps prose, which ‘behaves more like a dog – footed, tactless, indentured to its nose.’ McKay’s wanderings take him to the Pacific Coast, to northern British Columbia, and to Newfoundland. He makes a lengthy excursion, too, through the landscape of Canadian poetry.

The Shell of the Tortoise, as the subtitle indicates, is a book in five parts. The first essay, ‘Ediacaran and Anthropocene,’ appeared in the literary journal Prairie Fire (January 2009); the second, ‘Great Flint Singing,’ introduced an anthology of poetry, Open Wide a Wilderness: Canadian Nature Poems, published in 2009; the third, ‘From Here to Infinity (or so),’ was issued separately by the Institute for Coastal Research at Vancouver Island University in 2011; and the fourth, which lends its title to the collection, concluded a selection of his poetry, Field Marks, published in 2006. ‘The Muskwa Assemblage,’ an amalgam of poetry and prose, appeared as a slim, hand-printed volume from Gaspereau Press in 2008. McKay’s faithful readers may therefore recognize at least some of these works. (The notes suggest that minor changes have been made throughout.) Three of the original publications, however, were relatively obscure and, in the case of The Muskwa Assemblage, expensive – its current list price is nearly twice that of The Shell of the Tortoise. Thus the present book serves the purpose of making readily available discrete yet complementary works; together they illustrate the continuities in McKay’s writing about poetics and ecology. The essays in The Shell of the Tortoise supplement those in Vis à Vis (2001) and Deactivated West 100 (2005) but also demonstrate the author’s shifting topical preferences. There are remarkably few birds in this book, by McKay’s standards, but it extends the geological musings of Deactivated West 100 and Strike/Slip (2006). His explorations of fossilology illuminate the poems of Paradoxides (2012), which is named for an ancient trilobite.

The connections between McKay’s poetry and his prose range from the thematic to the lexical. When he writes in ‘Great Flint Singing’ of the ‘tremolo and edge’ of the sublime as manifest in Wordsworth’s Prelude, his own ‘Icarus,’ from Another Gravity (2000), comes to mind; in that poem, the wax-winged would-be bird ‘is thinking tremolo and / backflip.’ The metaphorical dog in ‘The Shell of the Tortoise,’ ‘indentured to its nose,’ invites comparison with the birdwatcher in ‘Field Marks,’ a poem from Birding, or desire (1983), who attempts ‘to become / a dog’s nose of receptiveness.’ Such links make The Shell of the Tortoise an invaluable source of explications and embellishments of McKay’s poems. McKay writes sensitively, too, about other poets and their works – Duncan Campbell Scott, Charles G.D. Roberts, Dennis Lee, and many more – in what he views as the rich history of Canadian nature poetry. His excitement about Earle Birney’s ‘Bushed’ is especially appealing: ‘These slant rhymes and emphatic rhythms seem to be enacting linguistically the kind of whetting which the winds perform on the mountain.’ (The title of ‘Great Flint Singing’ derives from a line from ‘Bushed.’) His commentary inevitably reveals something...