Poet, photographer, musician and abstract painter Roy Kiyooka was, as John Bentley Mays put it, "a motive force in Vancouver's astonishing creative incandescence of the 1960s."; Kiyooka recalled much later, "Energy was an outpouring of the Sixties with all its utopian spirit and hallucinatory drugs and strange otherworldliness and madness. And that persists in a person like me.";

Enigmatic, playful and profound as a multi-media artisan, Kiyooka continued to be a 'motive force' for decades, whether his experimentalism was in vogue or not.

Following his death in January of 1994, Mothertalk (NeWest Press $16.95), was published. It was based primarily on Kiyooka's 1993 interviews with his Japanese Canadian mother Mary Kiyoski Kiyooka and included an interview with Kiyooka's father, Harry Shigekiyo Kiyooka, whose samurai teachings had been influential on his son.

Now Kiyooka's artistic family has gathered for All Amazed (Arsenal $19.95), co-published by the Belkin Gallery. Edited by John O'Brian, Naomi Sawada and Scott Watson, it's based on a 2001 UBC conference with input from Michael Ondaatje, Marlatt, Watson, O'Brian, Roy Miki and others.

Mothertalk 1-896300-24-3
All Amazed 1-55152-117-2

[BCBW SUMMER 2002]