What's the difference between "here"; and "there";? As P.K. Page wrote decades ago in a prophetic piece about global warming, "only an inconsequential little letter t.";

Roy Miki, whose previous book won a Governor General's award, offers a kaleidoscope of words, neither lyrical nor confessional, in There. The words tumble and re-tumble in seemingly random connections without narrative thread except for the interconnections of travel. Miki's poems are set on, at least, three continents. In every place there is some collision between the local and the global, the present and memory, often tense. Readers can easily tire of being hectored about globalization but Miki pulls it off because his mode is metonymy not lecture.

"Dumbfounded associations
in the pinball micro drama
hosted by a disheveled memory
bank of accruing global debts
The world bank on my back
to rein deficits and cut losses
by slicing off the surplus syntax";

Miki's reeling associations left this reader dumbfounded but fascinated. Puzzling and for-midable but not forbidding, these poems reward a second, diligent reading; "the hologrammic undertow finally proves disarming."; As well, There contains oblique references to Miki's Japanese Canadian heritage.

"O ghostly gatekeeper on the shore
We come from lands beyond your lonely ken
We come on hobbled wings of a dream of riches
Our credentials stowed in this modest furoshiki
Believe me we are not a burden in a bundle of sticks
We never hurl idiosyncrasies at just any crass wall...";

Though never an easy read, the multiplicity of voices in overheard snatches is intense. Photos and photomontages set in the text, beautifully reproduced in colour, provide welcome visual relief. Miki's work is exciting! Someone has to do it; stretch the limits of language to open up the borderlands of poetry. 1-55420-036-1

-- Review by Hannah Main-van der Kamp, who writes mainly from Victoria.

[BCBW 2007] "Poetry"