Song of the Vulgar Starling

Don Precosky teaches English at the College of New Caledonia. He is the
co-editor of It’s Still Winter, an online journal of contemporary
Canadian poetry and poetics, and Four Realities: Poets of Northern B.C.

There is something about living in Fredericton, New Brunswick, that
seems to make poets want to write realistic descriptive poetry. To
Roberts, Carman, Bailey, Cogswell, and Brewster we can add Eric Miller.
Lines like this opening to “Eyes and Ice” put him firmly in the
tradition: “The smell of woodsmoke in the morning / Proposes itself as
the odour of sunrise.” Within that realist-descriptive framework
Miller covers an impressive variety of subjects, contemporary and
historical, and employs an equally impressive variety of styles ranging
from snapshots to a 30-page epistolary prose-poem. Song of the Vulgar
Starling is an exciting debut volume. May his second book follow soon.