bp Nichol's The Martyrology is a work of major dimensions. Nichol has found a way to make the many private and personal visions that go into his poetry available to his readers. He has, as a friend said, "created a personal mythology out of language itself"; a mythology that partakes of basic mythic geography yet remains singularly his own. Moreover, he has also clearly revealed the ways in which this mythology, the hagiography of saints about which the work turns, touches the various myths of our world, from the ancient myths of the heavens in almost every culture to the various popcult myths of our own time.

Before The Martyrology proper begins, there appears a short sequence titled "from: The Chronicles of Knarn," which has an intergalactic and futuristic setting. It is a kind of sf tale, setting up a specifically literary sf dimension for all that follows...