Reviews

Deactivated West 100

Michael Hayward

In Deactivated West 1 (Gaspereau Press), Don McKay continues to develop the poetics of place that he began with Vis à Vis (Gaspereau Press, 21). In both books he tries “to think the relation between place and wilderness without going dizzy from abstraction.” In McKay’s words, “the background for Deactivated West 1 is a particular fault line on southern Vancouver Island known as the Loss Creek-Leech River fault. I decided, as part of my apprenticeship to west coast landscapes, to walk the fault line from end to end and take note of whatever it presented to me in terms of rocks, plants, animals, birds (of course) and human history.” The title comes from the deactivated logging road that McKay follows along Loss Creek from the point on the southwest coast of Vancouver Island where it empties into the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The fault leads almost due east, beginning at a pebble beach, then moving up toward a clear-cut from which McKay can look south across a bank of fog to the Olympic Mountains. Deactivated West 1 is a “geopoetic” exploration of a landscape. In six movements McKay invokes basalt, the schists and argillites; he contemplates “lostness,” the katabatic winds and the untamed thought. The Loss Creek fault, which gives McKay direct access to the heart of wilderness, is also a metaphor that allows him to cut a cross-section through familiar, illuminating events on vastly different time scales, from the geologic to the intimately human. The ridges that formed when the Crescent and the Pacific Rim terranes collided forty million years ago and the abandoned logging machinery rusting in the rain forest are points along the same continuum: two related aspects of one place.

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