B. P. Nichol, who signs his published works bp Nichol, has ranged further and attempted more in his researches into language than many poets writing today. His formal experiments and his collaborations with other artists have extended the boundaries of every kind of writing he has tried, and his work in poetry, prose, concrete and visual poetry, and sound poetry is recognized as seminal in contemporary literature. As Frank Davey points out, Nichol is the only one of the experimental poets who came to the fore in 1960s Canada who "has consciously adopted a symbolist and semioticist attitude to language and form" which is based on "the linguistic experiments of Dada and Gertrude Stein and in the semiotic experiments of European and South American visual poetry." His influence has been felt in the 1970s as other writers adopted similar approaches to language, at least in part because he...