A Dog's Nose of Receptiveness: A Calvinoesque Reading of Don McKay.

This article focuses on poet Don McKay's literary works. Like a birder with binoculars, a poet like McKay wears extra eyes around his neck. McKay's avian precision moves from bird-guide delineations to metaphor, as with a sharp-shinned hawk's "short / roundish wings, streaked breast, talons fine and slender as the x-ray of a baby's hand." Or, vice-versa, they move from metaphor to fieldguidisms, as when a faded goldfinch in September is seen "asway/tossing the thistle's white hairs to the wind," then is described as "brownish grey and slightly yellow at the throat and shoulder."