To PUT IT bluntly: Don McKay has got in Night Field, his seventh poetry collection, some dozens of passages that do for me what I have pictured myself as so greatly desiring and so rarely finding in anybody`s craft or sullen art - anybody`s anywhere. There are enough such passages that (and here I come finally to the downside) I wonder why he ever stumbles, weakens, flaws them in the way that he quite often does. There`s hardly a poem without some good news in it, some lyrical moment you want to last for a long while; but often the poet doesn`t seem to trust his own lovely couple of lines, his already- achieved epiphany; we find him trying to nail it down, trying to make apparent to us what was so subtly and movingly and even, I will say, so perfectly rendered already. Take `Another Theory of Dusk," presented here in its entirety: What is there to say when the sky pours in the window and the ground begins to eat its figures? We sit like dummies in our kitchen, deaf among enormous crumplings of light. Small wonder each thing looms crowding its edge. In silent movies everyone overacts a little. It would be nice to breathe the air inside the cello. That would satisfy one thirst of the voice. As it is only your ribcage speaks for me now, a wicker basket full of sorrow and wish, so tough so finely tuned we have often reinvented the canoe and paddled off. It would be nice to write the field guide for those riverbanks, to speak without names of the fugitive nocturnal creatures that live and die in our lives. How fine! How strong! The ground "begins to eat its figures"; "enormous crumplings of light . " All of that first stanza right up to and including its fine, gently deprecating last line. And although the cello seems off-pitch we`re very soon back among the freshly con ceived images again, that wicker-basket ribcage leading to the surreal but so right reinventing of and paddling off in the canoe. Gorgeous stuff, for sure. But a poem with all that quality in it, all of it just throbbing with freshness and new ness, shouldn`t allow anything as mushy as those "fugitive nocturnal creatures" into it, should it? One more example. In "Meditation on Snow Clouds Approaching the University from the Northwest," we find, after a successful first stanza, this: The clouds look inward, thinking of a way to put this. Possibly dying will be such a pause: the cadence where we meet a bird or animal to lead us, somehow, out of language and intelligence. Well, maybe you`ll like every bit of this, but here`s how 1 feel about it: 1 admire the first three lines a very great deal, but to me it is clear that the poem must end there. If it does I shall then know it by heart forever and think of it often, and it will add to the interest of my private unexpressed thoughts on who knows how many future occasions when I look at or think of clouds. And so I`m sorry that McKay allows that genteel word "cadence" to blur all this, followed by the not-all-that-fresh idea of some "bird or animal" in its familiar role as moral superior to our sapient but screwed-up selves. I need to add, by way of more general comment, that McKay still has, of course, his marvellous birds, echoes of those kestrels and sharpshins and sparrowhawks and peregrines of Birding, or Desire (1983); that he still likes to reflect on his existential situation, "among the starswirl and the mix of elements"; that he contrasts, usually with elegance and a likeable self-mockery, the life of the clerc with a parallel world of spiffy red trucks, potato salad recipes and `All-Bran saved my marriage." Many of these poems are built on such terrain, and I will loosely generalize and say that when they`re self-indulgent they`re at risk and when they`re not they`re not, then they`re humane and sophisticated and often funny, And I will also say that he now and then reminds me of Philip Larkin, balancing the ribald with the delicate ("a committee of dogs ... sniffing crotches" not far from "grazing the surface of soft / improbable objects with exquisite / fish-bites"), the deliberately trite with the overflowingly moving ("the hassles of cash-flow," "the great shrines of sleep"). Above and beyond all these, though, there`s the lyric brilliance I want to leave in your mind more than anything else. From a poem remembering how shoestores would invite you to see a sort of X-ray of your feet inside the putative new shoes: You looked down zillions, back into an ocean where a loose family of fish was wriggling in blue spooky light There are many more examples. Who do you know who has half this poet`s gift for metaphor?