Pulp Log

William Blackburn is a professor of English at the University of
Calgary.

The pollution of the environment is surely one of the most depleted of
our literary resources today, and it is the nominal subject of this
collection of prose poems. That Barry McKinnon is able to do something
new with it, despite the ravages of our clear-cutting literati, is a
fine tribute to his creative power. The fact that “we are the source
of our own undoing” provides the dominant metaphor that gives this
work its strong thematic unity. The book’s prime subject—“making
landscape of self”—is also its prime problem, given the author’s
keen awareness of “the mind unstable, unable to integrate [in] the
coliseum of swilled and self deceptive dreams.” And the mere act of
entering the arena is itself suspect and reductive: “Is this a cost of
beauty, the focus of word and thought to make the thing already there,
there as object of seeing?” Can the gauds and geegaws of poetry ever
satisfy our hunger to believe that “life is elsewhere but this pit?”
Perhaps. But, if it can do so, it can do so only by leading us to the
desolation of all our certainties: “once out of yourself, there’s
the possible desert of the unknown.” McKinnon is clearly at home in
the desert of the quotidian, familiar with the old “fear that it does
add to nothing,” that there is “no bridge, no scaffold, no
holding.” The courage and disciplined eloquence with which he
confronts this fear richly justify his contention that “thought is
purest in pain.”