Poetry is the most personal of the literary arts; laureates notwithstanding, few poets enjoy national stature nowadays, and fewer still are known beyond the boundaries of their native land. But most people can name a favourite poet or two, and Don McKay is one of mine (endnotes on McKay’s Deactivated West 100 and Strike/Slip were published in earlier issues of Geist). For this reason I was pleased to see The Muskwa Assemblage, McKay’s new book, published by Gaspereau Press in The Muskwa Assemblage, McKay is particularly fascinated by the relationship between language and landscape. While pondering “the nameless mountains and nameless creeks” around him, McKay considers how “language abhors a vacuum,” as he feels the “impulse to supply names” becoming active in him, connecting him to the early scientists and explorers who “left their names—or those of their heroes, friends, wives, mistresses or pets—attached to the species and landforms they encountered,” naming being an act that apparently satisfies “some primal urge in the hyperlinguistic species like ours.”