An angular unconformity is a border between two rock sequences, one lying at a distinct angle to the other, which represents a significant gap -- often millions of years -- in the geologic record. (Imagine a biography that has several decades simply unaccounted for.) It might also be described as a fissure through which deep time leaks into history and upsets its authority.

Angular Unconformity shows us a life's work in cross-section, a restless and humane intelligence, ever searching, ever shifting, finding significance in our blink-of-an-eye existence against a backdrop of geological time unimaginable in its scale.

A shrewd observer of teh sounds and the poetics of nature, Don McKay attunes his senses to bird song and music, to human presence and geological formations, to vernacular speech and inanimate silence. In his eloquent, yet exuberant encountes with the wilderness, he walks the fault line between the known and the unknown, testing the uncertain mechanism of language and its imperfect gestures toward meaning.

This first comprehensive collection of Don McKay's poetry displays this pre-eminent Canadian poet's gift for thinking through metaphor, for channelling a profound philosophical discourse through poetic imagery. In poem after poem, his disciplined attention and contemplative mind break through the commonplace, illuminating an ecological understanding of the world as it is.

Don McKay has published numerous books of poetry and several books of essays. The poetry has been recognized with a number of awards, including two Governor General's Awards and the Griffin Poetry Prize. His most recent book of essays, The Shell of the Tortoise, received the Winterset Prize for Excellence in Newfoundland and Labrador Writing for 2011. Paradoxides, his most recent book of poems, winner of the E.J. Pratt Prize for Poetry, includes meditations on geology and deep time, while pursuing ongoing obsessions with birds and tools. He lives in St. John's, Newfoundland.