The Centre

Edward L. Edmonds is a professor of education at the University of
Prince Edward Island.

There is no middle ground about this book; readers will either like it
or dislike it. McKinnon writes accomplished “open” poetry in the
best tradition of Ezra Pound or Charles Olsen. Readers unacquainted with
this genre, who expect meaning to occur in the more familiar form of
modulated, composed, completed periods, will find this open form quite
inadequate, even unintelligible. For the initiated, however,
McKinnon’s impressionistic, expressionistic, and elliptical style is
highly subjective. The phrasing, for all its apparent fragmentariness,
is carefully meditated, mediated, and selective. Although the frequent
unclosed parenthesis is very much an Olsen stylistic device,
McKinnon’s voice is very much his own. The title poem, “The
Centre,” is an “improvisation” on Pound’s “Unwobbling
Pivot,” a translation of the Confucian Chung Yung. Pierre Coupey’s
painting on the front cover reflects this, with the vertical thin white
line representing “The Centre.”

Many of the poems in this collection have been previously published in
various journals. The last section (“Arrhythmia”) won a national
award in 1994.