Poems selected and read by the author on the themes of birds, birding and flight, accompanied by bird song field recordings.

39 MP3 Songs in this album (77:26) !
Related styles: SPOKEN WORD: Poetry, SPOKEN WORD: Audiobook



Details:
Don McKay

Two time winner of the Governor General's Award for Poetry (1991, 2000), Don McKay is also fondly known as an avid birder. For Songs of the Songs of Birds, his Rattling Books project, Don selected poems relating to birds, birding and flight. In 2007 Don McKay was awarded the Griffin Prize for Poetry for his book of poems Strike / Slip (McClelland & Stewart, 2006).


Songs for the Songs of Birds

The work of a much loved Canadian birding poet Songs for the Songs of Birds celebrates the way birds "articulate the air" and considers what the world would be without them. Narrated by the Author, the soundtrack features bird song recordings identified to species. Listen to poetry while learning bird songs!

Many of the poems in this selection have appeared in previous printed collections of poetry by Don McKay. Many are found in Camber (McClelland & Stewart, 2004), some in Strike / Slip (McClelland & Stewart, 2006) and a few make their first appearance in this selection.

Poems selected and read by Don McKay
Recorded and mixed by Janet Russell
Field Recordings of birds by Dave Fifield
Cover photograph of a Song Sparrow by Dave Fifield
Cover design by Mike Mouland
With thanks to Stan Dragland.

Praise for Don McKay

âThese exuberantly musical and shrewd poems are ecological in the fullest sense of the word: they seek to elucidate our relationships with our fragile dwelling places both on the earth and in our own skins.â
â New York Times Book Review

âHe is our most inventive poet, a master of metaphor and a stylist with impeccable tone.â
â Patrick Lane, Globe and Mail

âIn McKayâs work, attention is the foundation of a poetics and an ethics in which otherness is respected, indeed cherished, for its ability to unhouse.â
â Judgesâ citation, 2007 Griffin Poetry Prize

In Canada, wilderness is usually north of the towns and cities clustered in the south. McKay hikes and canoes in this wilderness whenever he can. But wilderness also travels. It often reaches McKay on the wing. He is fascinated by birds, those hollow-boned, flighted creatures dense with otherness â not like the conventional birder, the identifier and collector of species, but as a poet for whom birdwatching 'involves a mental set nearly identical to writing: a kind of suspended expectancy, tools at the ready, full awareness that the creatures cannot be compelled to appear' ('Some Remarks,' 207). His desire is to place himself, in language, where language has no purchase, where

"the only writing is the writing of the glaciers on the rocks
the only thinking is the river slowly
knowing its valley (Lependu 47) "

- Stan Dragland ( University of Toronto Quarterly- Vol 70 No. 4, Fall 2001)