Title: Strike/Slip

Author: Don McKay

Publisher: McClelland & Stewart

Website: http://www.randomhouse.ca/

Released: February 28, 2006

Pages: 78

ISBN: 978-0-7710-5543-0 (0-7710-5543-9)

$17.99 CDN/$12.95 US

4 Stars

Reviewed by: Kaitlyn Cursley

Strike/Slip is a thirty-eight poem poetry book written by Canada’s own Don McKay. Over the years McKay has received the Governor General’s Awards for poetry, and his book Chamber: Selected Poems has twice been short listed for the Griffin Poetry Prize as well as gaining the title of Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year. With this in mind it is no surprise that McKay is a fabulous poet.

I have to confess that I have never truly enjoyed or found delight in reading poetry. There are of course the select few poems that I treasure but on the whole, reading poetry has never been a particularly pleasurable experience for me. Yet, since Strike/Slip was the first Don McKay poetry book that I have ever read, I kept an open mind. I am glad that I chose to leave my past opinions of poetry behind for I discovered that Strike/Slip was both engaging and over all a phenomenal collage of poems. The poems themselves are well written, they flow, and the use of language is superb with an element of perfection to each capsule of verse. Two particular poems that I enjoyed were “The Canoe People” and “Look at Me World,” I would say that these two poems were the gems that sparkled most out of an authentic collection.

All of the poems fell into the theme of nature; almost all of the poems were designed to celebrate our Canadian outdoors and more particularly, the vast British Columbian wilderness. Poems regarding rivers, moons, hiking, and even quartz crystals, filled the pages of Strike/Slip; revealing McKay’s love for not only poetry but for the Canadian wilderness as well. In all if you delight in literature that celebrates the great outdoors I ask you to look no further and take pleasure in the beautifully moulded poems of Don McKay.