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Eric Miller

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

A Voyage to Vancouver, Part Five

Posted on Monday, Apr 5, 2021 1:20AMMonday, April 5, 2021 by Eric Miller

In memory of Joe Blades, Broken Jaw Press embodied by Eric Miller Copse and cosmos Do you find that, even while garden-seated—garden-stirring—, you yearn after gardens? Or that, once you have gotten in, you dapple the place with other spots and then, like a mirage, abide in the very measure in which you cease to…

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A Voyage to Vancouver, Part Four

Posted on Monday, Mar 8, 2021 1:25AMMonday, March 8, 2021 by Eric Miller

by Eric Miller Discovery Conditions on the ground, if you want the moral of a garden or this excursion right away, are widely discrepant from what they look like from afar. In this respect, naturalists concur with soldiers. Linnaeus’s Philosophia Botanica, a manual for those with some interest in plant life, tells the eighteenth-century traveller…

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A Voyage to Vancouver, Part Three

Posted on Monday, Feb 8, 2021 1:10AMMonday, February 8, 2021 by Eric Miller

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…

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A Voyage to Vancouver, Part Two

Posted on Monday, Jan 11, 2021 1:10AMMonday, January 11, 2021 by Eric Miller

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…

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A Voyage to Vancouver, Part One

Posted on Monday, Dec 14, 2020 1:15AMMonday, December 14, 2020 by Eric Miller

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…

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A Journey to Salt Spring Island; or, Give the Guy a Raise

Posted on Monday, Nov 16, 2020 1:20AMMonday, November 16, 2020 by Eric Miller

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…

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A sketch including the painter, Paraskeva Clark

Posted on Monday, Oct 19, 2020 1:45AMMonday, October 19, 2020 by Eric Miller

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…

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Mies van der Rohe and the End of Birds

Posted on Monday, Sep 21, 2020 1:25AMMonday, September 21, 2020 by Eric Miller

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…

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The Gait of Water-Nymphs

Posted on Monday, Aug 24, 2020 1:20AMMonday, August 24, 2020 by Eric Miller

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.…

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Mountain Geometry

Posted on Monday, Jul 27, 2020 1:10AMMonday, July 27, 2020 by Eric Miller

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…

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Titia Brongersma on the Beach

Posted on Monday, Jun 29, 2020 1:25AMMonday, June 29, 2020 by Eric Miller

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…

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Outer Harbour — A Memoir

Posted on Monday, Jun 1, 2020 1:05AMMonday, June 1, 2020 by Eric Miller

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…

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On Rafaël Newman’s sonnet “In a Taxi, Shared Abroad”

Posted on Monday, Jul 1, 2019 1:05AMMonday, July 1, 2019 by Eric Miller

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…

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