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IN THE MILLENNIUM
In the Millennium is a varied, 144-page collection in thirteen segments. It does not, at first glance, invite the reader in.
McKinnon stretches language and form. It takes a few readings to get the gist and admire it. Will readers have the patience? We live and read under the tyranny of instant access and these poems do not lend themselves to a quick hit. Yet someone has to do it; stretch the language.
The complex realities that inform his poems are fractured on the page, cut up, jagged, interspersed on spaced-out lines. Spliced assemblages do not make for pretty poems. McKinnon says he wants his poems to be "habitable and yet show dissolving forces.";
Section One is one of the most challenging and one wishes the editor had placed another section at the opening of this volume, such as a 20-page photographic journal about the abandoned saw mill town of Giscombe, or "Bolivia/Peru,"; which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award when it was first published by BookThug in Toronto.
About his travels in South America, McKinnon says he entered the experience "naked/naïve to it-perhaps the only way to risk any world's range of pleasures/dangers - to know a little more";. This is as true for travel as it is for experiments in poetic form. Enter boldly, learn something.
Born in 1944, McKinnon is of the age group currently saying goodbye to parents. His elegiac long poem on the death of his father concentrates on the father-son relationship. How awkward the small talk, how awkward the intimacy, how poignant the small memories, and then the relief when the father is gone.
"I came into this world again, a strange/ and conscious birth/ without word/without road/ without a father.
Review by poet and teacher Hannah Main-van der Kamp
McKinnon stretches language and form. It takes a few readings to get the gist and admire it. Will readers have the patience? We live and read under the tyranny of instant access and these poems do not lend themselves to a quick hit. Yet someone has to do it; stretch the language.
The complex realities that inform his poems are fractured on the page, cut up, jagged, interspersed on spaced-out lines. Spliced assemblages do not make for pretty poems. McKinnon says he wants his poems to be "habitable and yet show dissolving forces.";
Section One is one of the most challenging and one wishes the editor had placed another section at the opening of this volume, such as a 20-page photographic journal about the abandoned saw mill town of Giscombe, or "Bolivia/Peru,"; which won the bpNichol Chapbook Award when it was first published by BookThug in Toronto.
About his travels in South America, McKinnon says he entered the experience "naked/naïve to it-perhaps the only way to risk any world's range of pleasures/dangers - to know a little more";. This is as true for travel as it is for experiments in poetic form. Enter boldly, learn something.
Born in 1944, McKinnon is of the age group currently saying goodbye to parents. His elegiac long poem on the death of his father concentrates on the father-son relationship. How awkward the small talk, how awkward the intimacy, how poignant the small memories, and then the relief when the father is gone.
"I came into this world again, a strange/ and conscious birth/ without word/without road/ without a father.
Review by poet and teacher Hannah Main-van der Kamp
Submitted on August 11, 2010 in By David.
