New ebooks From Canadian Indies
Description
bpNichol (1944-1988) has attained iconic status in Canadian literature in recent years, particularly through his lifelong poem The Martyrology and his work in visual and sound poetry. Numerous early "fugitive" sequences of Nichol's are often referred to in critical studies, but are long out of print and only available in library special collections or in the hands of rare book collectors. bp: beginnings brings together his pre-Martyrology materials in one comprehensive collection, including such key texts as Nichol's first chapbooks Beach Head and Cycles Etc., the minimal lyric sequences of The Other Side of the Room and The Journeying and the Returns, and various concrete and sound-texts such as Lament, The Year of the Frog and Ballads of the Restless Are. These collected sequences show Nichol developing his talents in both visual poetry and lyricism, pointing the way towards the union of the two forms in the later Martyrology. Combined with The Captain Poetry Poems (published by BookThug in 2011), bp: beginnings now makes all of Nichol's major poetry sequences available to both the avid Nichol specialists and to aficionados of innovative poetry everywhere.
Editorial Review
Praise for JOURNEYING & the returns
The poems attend to the songs to be found in speech, as they tell of a young man finding his whole self – physical, moral, emotional – in his closest surroundings, the mountains overlooking Vancouver, their pine needles, the west drop-off straight … what is written is very weill written, with a sire understanding of notation, with a remarkable ability to make notation induce rhythm.
– George Bowering, 1967
The range of simple terms finds a sure place in language – salt water and tap water, beach fire and astronomical fire and living energy, space framed and leaking and hollowing and flowing down transcontinental RR tracks, lives finding singular form in an infolding and opening-out whole.
– Margaret Avison, 1967
Praise for Beach Head
The Governor General's Committee this year made brave and intelligent choices … [Nichol] is now a consummate craftsman in his handling of sound in poems, and in these poems, you can see him already learning how to do it … Most of the poems in this book … are very personal examinations of behaviour, almost confessional in nature, and yet they are not, in any way private, they speak to us all.
– Douglas Barbour, 1971
