Revisiting Last Year's New Year's Resolutions: Don McKay

This time last year Rattling Books ran a New Year's Resolution Contest here at REDEFiNE iT: Dictionary of Newfoundland English.

Among the winners was this one from Don McKay.

January 2nd and your head still feels like a waddock that's been bashed up and down the field by size thirteen spaugs, and no wonder, you're after being a slinger randying all Christmas, guzzling the screech and stuffing your gob, telling your old cuffers filled with all that pishogue, how you were forever grassing in the bawn like the rawny merrybegot you are, how you'd marl up the droke with a joke and a bottle and all the girls waiting to kiss you in the drung behind the church hall, way back when you were but a lewardly nuzzle tripe of a angishore before the blue drop got in your blood and you were out jiggering for cod with the bawks and guds whirling overhead, the gillies, turrs and tickleaces skimming the surface, the swiles sculling and diving, now here you are so hung over you can hardly stand to shive the goowiddy off your fousty face, yes my son, you say to the boo in the mirror, you've been a jeezly seeny-sawny long enough, it's time for a whole yaffle of resolutions, if only you could figure out where to start.

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Don McKay is a poet whose most recent book Strike/Slip was awarded the Griffin Prize. In 2008 he selected and read poems of his on the themes of birds, birding and flight which he recorded with Rattling Books. The result was Songs for the Songs of Birds.

Most recently Don McKay has been honoured by the Government of Canada as a new member of the Order of Canada.