Field Marks

This volume features thirty-five of Don McKay’s best poems, which are selected with a contextualizing introduction by Méira Cook that probes wilderness and representation in McKay, and the canny, quirky, thoughtful, and sometimes comic self-consciousness the poems adumbrate. Included is McKay’s afterword written especially for this volume in which McKay reflects on his own writing process—its relationship to the earth and to metamorphosis. Don McKay has published eight books of poetry. He won the Governor General’s Award in 1991 (for Night Field) and in 2000 (for Another Gravity), a National Magazine Award (1991), and the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry in 1984 (for Birding, Or Desire). Don McKay was shortlisted for the 2005 Griffin Poetry Prize for Camber and was the Canadian winner of the 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize for Strike/Slip. Born in Owen Sound, Ontario, McKay has been active as an editor, creative writing teacher, and university instructor, as well as a poet. He has taught at the University of Western Ontario, the University of New Brunswick, The Banff Centre, The Sage Hill Writing Experience, and the BC Festival of the Arts. He has served as editor and publisher of Brick Books since 1975 and from 1991 to 1996 as editor of The Fiddlehead. He resides in British Columbia.

A lyrical field guide to the natural world surrounding the eastern U.S.'s residential areas profiles a wide variety of plant, animal, and insect life, in a reference that offers insight into birdfeeder behaviors, woodpile ecology, and more.

Maya Ishida is no stranger to sorrow. Torn from her artist father in her native Japan, raised by her cold, ambitious mother in Minneapolis, she has finally put together a life with few disruptions: a safe marriage and a quiet life weaving clothes in a country studio. The past is no more than a story she vaguely remembers; the present is a gray landscape of solitary pleasures and modest expectations. After her father dies, Maya is pulled back into the memory of their parting. In his many stories of Orpheus and Eurydice and of the tennyo, a mythic Japanese figure, he had taught her that love means making the sacrifice of letting go. And so she had walked away from him without looking back. Twenty-four years later, holding her father's last sketch, Maya knows she can avoid looking back no longer. She must question her placid marriage, her decision not to become an artist, and even the precarious peace she has made with her mother before she can be released--to feel passion, risk change, and fall in love. Kyoko Mori's young adult novel, Shizuko's Daughter, was hailed in The New York Times Book Review as "a jewel...one of those rarities that shine out only a few times in a generation." In Stone Field, True Arrow, her first novel for adults, she sheds brilliant light on eternal questions about life and love.

Reprint of the original, first published in 1874.