'All of Nichol's work is stamped by his desire to create texts that are engaging in themselves as well as in context, and to use indirect structural and textual devices to carry meaning. In The Martyrology different ways of speaking testify to a journey through different ways of being. Language is both the poet’s instructor and, through its various permutations, the dominant 'image' of the poem. The [nine] books of The Martyrology document a poet’s quest for insight into himself and his writing through scrupulous attention to the messages hidden in the morphology of his own speech.’ – Frank Davey

BpNichol's The Martyrology is a long poem begun in 1967 and continuing until Nichol's death in 1988. It includes Books 1 & 2 (1972), Book(s) 7 & (1990), and Ad Sanctos: Book 9 (1992). The text in this volume is a facsimile, with minor corrections, of the 1990 edition of Gifts. --Coach House Books.

A wide spectrum of readings of bpNichol's challenging and innovative long poem.

Negation, Critical Theory, and Postmodern Textuality features 14 new essays by leading specialists in critical theory, comparative literature, philosophy, and English literature. The essays, which present wide-ranging historical considerations of negation in light of recent developments in poststructuralism and postmodernism, range over many of the siginificant texts in which negation figures prominently. The book includes a wide-ranging introductory chapter that examines how attention to negation -- the inescapable nescience that is posited in any and every linguistic expression -- enhances the hermeneutic possibilities present in language. In addition, the four sections of the book bring together major critical interventions on, among others, negative meaning, unrecognizability, elenctic negation, apocalypse, nihilism, negation and gender, and denegation. All the essays involve close attention to key texts by major authors, including William Shakespeare, Henry James, Federico García Lorca, Samuel Beckett, Thomas Bernhard, Walt Whitman, E.M. Forster, Mary Shelley, Margaret Atwood, Roland Barthes, Douglas Barbour, Paul de Man, bp Nichol, Jacques Derrida, and Dogen Kigen. The volume opens up new areas in critical theory, comparative literature, and the philosophy of language, and defines a major new area of inquiry in relation to notions of postmodern textuality. Critical theorists, students of comparative literature, English literature, and the history of ideas, and those interested in the hermeneutic implications of postmodernism will find this volume of substantial interest. Its extensive bibliographical apparatus and index make the collection a valuable reference tool for upper-level undergraduate and graduate students as well as for those seeking a variety of interpretive approaches to the problem of negation in literature.

From one of the most prolific and engaged book reviewers in Canada over the past 15 years, this collection of essays and reviews showcases the literary insight of rob mclennan. The works of such Canadian poets as George Bowering, Margaret Christakos, and Barry McKinnon are addressed and analyzed, as is the status of Canadian poetry as a whole. Mclennan’s own investigations into the craft of writing are uncovered as well. Strikingly innovative and refreshingly communal, this compilation works as a whole to demonstrate how mainstream Canadian literature can be reconciled with the art of fringe authors.