The Irish word for shadow, “scáth,” is also our word for shelter.
In a powerful long poem that captures the disquiet of our age with cinematic language and imagery, Conor Mc Donnell’s What We Know So Far Is … harkens back to the previous century in its daring. Drawing from his Irish heritage, his experience as a pediatrician and many other sources, Mc Donnell has created a work that echoes the scope of T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land and Hart Crane’s The Bridge. Both ecstatic and challenging, the lines of the poem are filled with allusions and references, with biology shading into history into cultures both ancient and contemporary, where words are predators and “memes disseminate cultural-genes.” Through it all runs Mc Donnell’s fascination with language, ever shifting, beguiling, mutating, virus-like. In these questioning, DNA-like lines, Mc Donnell shows us how to unmake and remake our understanding of the world.
About the Author :
Dr. Conor Mc Donnell is a poet and physician at the Hospital for Sick Children, Toronto. He is the author of two collections of poems (most recently, This Insistent List) and three chapbooks. His poetry has appeared in various Canadian and international publications as well as noted medical journals such as JAMA and CMAJ. He is an associate professor at the University of Toronto and editor in chief of Case Repertory, a Narrative-Based Medicine Lab publication that seeks to engage and promote the voice of the patient in collaboration with their health-carers. He is a frequently invited international lecturer on pediatric perioperative care, error prevention and opioid stewardship, and he is current vice-president of the Canadian Pediatric Anesthesia Society. Conor works weekends at Sellers & Newel Second-Hand Books in Little Italy, Toronto, where they have words for people like him.
Review :
"Conor’s awareness of language extends beyond his creative work. In the daily language of his medical practice, he finds that words often conceal as much as they reveal."
"The internal contradiction is redolent of the sometimes frustrating confusion at the heart of language and (mis)communication, while also operating as a defiant rebuke to cultural sameness and linguistic enervation."
"Somehow, Mc Donnell captures all of humanity into a mere 85 pages, but he also captures all of speech as well."
“An astonishing, searing, mindbending piece of writing.”
"This beautifully crafted and structured collection does not offer a reductionist reading of the world through a poet’s eyes but rather encourages the reader to go beyond what they know so far. Imagine, the poet seems to be positing, what else lies beyond that."
"On one level, one can read this collection and pleasure in the music, in the words, allusions and images. But if we do that, what we might miss is the howl (think Allen Ginsberg). What We Know So Far Is … a cry for our time, a cry for us lost in a haptic world."
