These poems span fifteen years of life in the northern industrial output of Prince George, BC. They portray family, friendship, sex, death, health, work, love and human hope as subjects of a harsh social, economic, and bureaucratic system that is itself trapped in its own contradictions and ironies. The Centre is McKinnon's first full-length book since Pulp Log, which won the BC Book Prize for poetry in 1991.

Barry McKinnon was born in 1944 in Calgary, Alberta where he grew up. In 1965, after two years of college, he went to Sir George Williams University in Montreal and took poetry courses with Irving Layton. He graduated in 1967 with a B.A. and in 1969 with an M.A. from U.B.C.(Vancouver), and was hired that same year to teach English at The College of New Caledonia in Prince George where he has lived ever since. McKinnon writes primarily in the form of the long poem/serial sequence, a form that gives him the necessary range in which to “articulate the poem’s central truth from various & variable angles & perspectives.” In his own words, he sees the long poem as “a way to log my experience & to record what I value most in a context of forces, subtle or not, that threaten those values.” As D.H. Lawrence writes: “We’ve got to live no matter how many skies have fallen.” McKinnon has been an active editor/publisher/designer since the late sixties. McKinnon’s recent work includes The Centre (Talonbooks, 2004) and In the Millenium (New Star, 2009), a thirteen-part collection of his poetry drawn from a ten-year period.

Barry McKinnon's profile page

"Not much happens in the eleven pieces collected in The Centre. Their author, Barry McKinnon, sometimes drinks beer in seedy stripper bars or coffee at Tim Horton’s, shops at Sears, drives his truck somewhere, cuts wood, paints his house, marks essays. The real action takes place inside his head, for the pieces collected here are all sequences and serial poems recording the play of their author’s consciousness, a brooding, often emotionally evocative play that makes pleasingly heavy weather of the clouded mind as it registers social and natural as well as psychological phenomena. At his best, which happens frequently if also irregularly throughout The Centre, McKinnon makes his particulars pay their way; they are not there for the free ride of local colour."

—Canadian Literature