bpNichol’s The Martyrology is one of the most outrageous, challenging, intriguing and accomplished long poems written in Canada. No other poem of its length has raised the major concerns of our time with such urgency and brilliance. Initially recognized by only a few, this luminous continuing work has attracted more and more readers with the appearance of each successive volume—Book 6 the most recent, with more books in process.

Tracing the Paths gathers contributions by a wide spectrum of readers who approach The Martyrology from both diverse and complementary critical paths. Interleaving the collection are comments by bpNichol, and the collection ends with a rich sampling of the next three books of this amazing unfolding work. There is also an introduction by editor Roy Miki, a bibliography of The Martyrology, reproductions of some manuscripts and text by bpNichol, and a chronology of personal and compositional events relevant to The Martyrology.

Tracing the Paths brings together the poet bpNichol and his readers in a collaborate form that is rare—if not unique—in Canadian criticism.

Roy Miki
Roy Miki is a writer, poet, and critic who has taught and written about the work of bpNichol for many years. He was the editor of Pacific Windows: Collected Poems of Roy K. Kiyooka which won the 1997 Poetry Award from the Association of Asian American Studies. His major bibliographic study, A Record of Writing: An Annotated and Illustrated Bibliography of George Bowering, won the Gabriel Roy award from the Association for Canadian and Quebec Literatures as the best book on Canadian Literature for 1991. Miki is also the editor of This Is My Own: Letters to Wes and Other Writings on Japanese Canadians (1985); Tracing the Paths: Reading‚ Writing The Martyrology (1988); co-editor with Cassandra Kobayashi of Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, and Meanwhile: The Critical Writings of bpNichol.

Cassandra Kobayashi
Cassandra Kobayashi helped shape the grass-roots community movement in Vancouver to seek redress for the forced removal, internment, and abrogation of the rights of Canadians of Japanese ancestry. She served on the national Redress Committee that negotiated the historic 1988 settlement with the Government of Canada. The struggle for redress is documented in her book, Justice in Our Time: The Japanese Canadian Redress Settlement, co-authored with Roy Miki.

Roy Miki's profile page