"An image is one of an infinite number of entrances to an arena where something ineffable has always been going on."; Or so says J. Michael Yates. In the sixties he was a black-leather-jacketed-motorcyclist-poet who taught Creative Writing. Since then he's constructed different personas and careers but J. Michael Yates has kept on writing. This volume is a representative sampling of new and collected work of an original presence on the West Coast writing scene; and it proves his poetry is standing the test of time. "Something is rising in the black throat of the sky. Something draws me into the earth by my eyes. Just beneath them the avalanches of flesh begin. The language of a man alone in the bush goes the colours of boulder-fields and lichen."; Distinctly the poetry of contemplative fishing in northern places (Alaska, Queen Charlottes), Hongyun includes the stunning Great Bear Lake Meditations which remain as fresh now as they were groundbreaking four decades ago. Also included, his Book of Interrogations is both rambling and erudite, a series of aphorisms on the art of writing. Sometimes prophetic, sometimes irascible, this Ecclesiastes of Poetics is an evocative summing up by a mature poet who hasn't compromised his aesthetic, though it metamorphosed constantly. Yates, a former publisher and prison guard, has earned his place in the pantheon of influential B.C. poets and this is a welcome collection. "Time and tide, exhaling here, now, after the long breathing-in of being young. Here on the subsiding side of both time and tide, among the clear pools full of things waiting for water to return, the steel-coloured sea-blade carving far out and almost out of sight, falling and falling and almost at low-slack. Time now to say inside it is almost good to know for a certainty with the blood: I can die."; 1-4208-2770-7

--review by Hannah Main-Van Der Kamp

[BCBW 2006] "Poetry"