Don McKay uses the image of a dead raven, strung up with baler twine, as an opening into a meditation on appropriation of matériel, the nature of wilderness, the paradox of home-making, and the art of being a nature poet. The poet appropriates matériel from its autonomous existence, but matériel is never completely captured; wilderness, in McKay's definition, is not just a set of endangered spaces but the capacity of all things to elude the mind's appropriations. Home-making is another appropriation -- the settling of the self into the world -- but paradoxically, home both claims place and acts to become a place among others. Poetic attention is a form of knowing that counters the primordial grasp in home-making and celebrates the wilderness of the other. McKay's acknowledges his debt to Romanticism's conceptualization of nature, but claims that poetic attention is based on a recognition and a valuing of the other's wilderness; it leads to a work which is not just a vestige of the other, but a translation of it.
