A fragment of Eric Miller’s novel in progress, The Canada Act, appears in the current issue of Spolia Magazine. His book-length translations include works by Wilhelm Waiblinger (We Are Like Fire) and Bettina Klix (Rapture of the Depths). Forthcoming is a further translation, of Titia Brongersma. Miller has written essays on Elizabeth Simcoe and Aphra Behn, among others. His prose and verse have appeared in small press editions in Canada. He lives on Vancouver Island. Email: millere [at] uvic.ca
by Eric Miller Flat cap For my part, the plank staircase angling by rickety twitches cliff-side down to Wreck Beach reminds me of the steps that stagger toward the Whirlpool below Niagara Falls. Each increment here in British Columbia is too short—each increment there, on the frontier of Ontario, too long. Yet a kind of…
by Eric Miller Tickets How apt that the person responsible for handling tickets to a Museum of Anthropology should herself sit in a vitrine! You cannot get in for free to an exhibition, how else could the museum sustain itself? It is an enterprise. Compensation is fair. History being what it is, we do not…
by Eric Miller To the mainland When we climb the stairwell out of the depth of the ferry, where our car rests parked amid grimy trucks, we find taut bands of yellow plastic tape setting off the tables and benches of the observation decks. We have to sit far from other people. Someone took pleasure…
by Eric Miller 1. Would you like to go to Salt Spring Island? Of course you would. You’ve never been. We have to pack with care. Don’t forget the coffee. Don’t forget the wine. Check the skybox! It keeps getting loose. How do the bolts unfasten so fast? Everyday stress, I guess. Tell me about…
by Eric Miller 1. A robin in the floating height of a pine warbled its fat phrases of three and, with its chest matching the tint of twilight clouds and light on leaves and houses—a lucent, resinous colour such as collected at the lower tip of every cone—, it seemed at once the motivation and…
by Eric Miller 1. My grandmother’s last dwelling smelled especially of aerosol hairspray and black currant preserves, a pair of odours that could epitomize, in a pinch, the domestic fragrance of provincial Ontario in the twentieth century. Toward the end of her independent life, she lived in a little box, a suburban tract house, and…
by Eric Miller Syrinx What was it, again, that, by 1877, Thomas H. Huxley decided to call the voice box of a bird? Syrinx. He alludes to a tale from Ovid. Rough Arcadia’s peremptory god, Pan, bears a name proclaiming an appetite that would have everything. Now he wants sex with Syrinx. The nymph refuses.…
by Eric Miller 1. On occasion, a long epoch of concord with a favouring breeze may seem to grace us: inspiration in the sense that birds must relish it. What a divine—almost avian—thing it was for us, the hotel kitchen staff, to pack cheesecake, kiwifruit and champagne into our rucksacks, to tighten the straps that…
by Eric Miller 1. Tell me, what could be more pleasant than to play, in the summertime, a Stone Age re-enactor? A couple of them sat in the flowery grass near a hunebed—a Giant’s Grave or cromlech, some five thousand years old—in the town of Borger, in Drenthe, the Netherlands. The shadow in which this…
by Eric Miller My father had an immensely fat friend whom I often glimpsed filling a plate alone at the buffet table of the King Eddie’s restaurant as I walked past that grand hotel. This man himself had a father even then in those days a nonagenarian, whom he saw daily, devotedly, taking him to…
by Eric Miller There is no hope for me but poetry. —Rafaël Newman 1. Toronto in the Seventies was still a filthy city. I was a teen then and because I dropped out of school I got to know the city very well at all hours and in all weathers. I would walk the day…