Reviews of The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader

The following are excerpts from and links to reviews of The Alphabet Game: A bpNichol Reader (Coach House Books 2007).

• From Eye Weekly: "One writer who never conceded defeat to the encroaching conventionality of the 1970s was the late bp Nichol. A poet in ways beyond the comprehension of most casual readers, Nichol set out from lyrical poetry to hinterlands where text is everything from unreadable sign to possible musical score and back again to a new kind of obsessive lyricism in his lifelong work The Martyrology. A new survey of his writing, The Alphabet Game (Coach House, 250 pages, $21.95), proves that Nichol was as uncompromising as Stan Brakhage was with film or Tony Conrad for music. And like Brakhage and Conrad, Nichol's art may have flourished and grown because of the time it was created in -- but by no means is it dated there."
• Interview with Lori Emerson on BlogTO
• From the Ottawa Citizen: "rob mclennan declared, 'I would give copies of The Alphabet Game: a bpNichol Reader, edited by Darren Wershler-Henry and Lori Emerson (Coach House Books, 2007). bpNichol is one of the most important Canadian poets of the 20th century, and this new selection should be on every aspiring writer or reader of poetry's "essential reading" list. When one reads Shakespeare, one is aware of just how far the language can take you, and reading bpNichol is no different. He was our Walt Whitman; there is the poetry that came before bpNichol, and the poetry that came after.'"
• Review in the Torontoist
• Review in the Edmonton Journal
• Review in Bookforum
• From Broken Pencil: "Barrie Phillip Nichol aka bpNichol experimented with visual and concrete poetry, performed as a member of The Four Horsemen and was a scriptwriter for Fraggle Rock. The Alphabet Game surprised me with its earnest love of place and people - the poems take you along Toronto streets, on trips in trains, into human relationships. Nichol's poetry plays around with language: it pushes, stretches and jokes. But it goes beyond that into a search for meaning in communication. In 'ABC: the aleph beth book,' Nichol writes: 'POETRY BEING AT DEAD END POETRY IS DEAD. HAVING ACCEPTED THIS FACT WE ARE FREE TO LIVE THE POEM.' It is a theme that runs through many of Nichol's poems: poetry is a living, oral thing that comes out of people. Nichol explores the oral theme again in a series of poems about mouths (vagina, mouth, tonsils). Nichol's poems are often process-driven. In Book V of his life-long poem The Martyrology the reader can choose between different chains of 'thot' in the poem. The visual poems are often puzzles that can be solved by moving your eyes around the poem until you can see what it means - some of them more obvious than others. In poems from Translating Translating Apollinaire Nichol takes a poem and puts it through a series of changes: alphabetizing, sound translation, line drawing, etc.
• Review in Canadian Literature
• From Publisher's Weekly (May 2008): "This beautifully produced volume fills a large gap in 20th century North American poetry, selecting from the great long works of a master of profound whimsy, and also including arresting examples from his nearly impossible to find early works in concrete poetry. In addition to completing the six volume Martyrology before his untimely death, Nichol (1944-1988), who was born in Vancouver, wrote for the muppet-based children’s show Fraggle Rock, and was a part of the seminal poetry performance troupe The Four Horsemen, which also included Steve McCaffrey. Editors Wershler-Henry and Emerson admittedly offer only a “fraction” of Nichol’s output, much of which consists of linked long poems in unconventional forms. But their selection is unfailingly intelligent and engaging, with an emphasis on Nichol’s ingenious visual play with words and images, making this the single best introduction to an essential writer."
• Review in The Women's Post (May 2008)