Top Culture
In the McKinnon: a report from the Core
Barry McKinnon will be a familiar name to some of you. He is northern BC’s most nationally recognized and award-winning poet and has spent decades promoting and teaching literature here in Prince George.
His newest book, In the Millennium, from New Star Books, is a collection of his poetry since 2000. It also marks the 40th anniversary of McKinnon’s arrival in Prince George in 1969.
For those unfamiliar with McKinnon, his writing is angular, hesitant, introspective, and dense; it is a careful dialogue between what he sees in Prince George (on his walks from his home in the Millar Addition near downtown) and his own internal responses. His writing will make one think of notes or journals—a record of what he is thinking at the exact moment he crosses the street at Third Avenue and George Street, for example. And so, the poems are intensely personal; they embrace relationships with his father (who passed away in 2000), his wife Joy, his friends (Cecil Giscombe, Ken Belford and George Stanley, among others), and his job as teacher at the College of New Caledonia (from which he is now retired).
Because the poems are so fragmented, one might be tempted to find them artless or harsh—and they are, in some way: they do not turn a blind eye to the ugly side of Prince George. They are not mellifluous and beautiful, in the traditional sense (Shakespeare, Wordsworth, etc), although there is a beauty to the halting way McKinnon encounters the contradictions of the place:
Cottonwood Island—30 below (March
river hued blue in / north sun
over mill
all energy is the incomplete
this end in space
(I glance the cutbanks
in the
irreversible luck of time to make
my heart a memory
This passage from “Surety Disappears” displays the way McKinnon turns every perception and awareness inward into a study of human emotion. A reader looking for pretty images or stories will be frustrated, but the one willing to get to know an intuitive mind at work will be rewarded with flashes of insight and the sensibilities of a long-time Prince George citizen. The book, especially through the poems “In the Millennium,” “A Walk,” “Prince George (Part One),” and “Prince George Core,” is a portrait of Prince George as the dream of one reflective/inventive man (“the man, the city—what parts in / the metaphor, this way of dreaming—is the heart a down / town?”).
This is a thank-you to Barry for his perseverance and poetic integrity. He is a true cultural ambassador for Prince George in the new millennium.
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