of Victoria
BA (Toronto), PhD (Virginia)
Poetry; the lyric essay; Friedrich Hoelderlin; Ann Radcliffe; Elizabeth Simcoe
Eric Miller is the author of three books of poetry, Song of the Vulgar Starling, In the Scaffolding, and The Day in Moss. The second of these was short-listed for the 2006 ReLit Award. His book of lyric essays, The Reservoir, was short-listed for the 2007 Hubert Evans Prize. A long section of his experimental four-part novel The Canada Act (three volumes of which are substantially complete) is appearing in Jessa Crispin’s Spolia Magazine. He has published a number of book-length translations. These include Linnaeus’s Nemesis Divina; Bettina Klix’s Rapture of the Depths; Johann Georg Sulzer’s Dialogues on the Beauty of Nature; and We Are Like Fire, a book comprising work by Wilhelm Waiblinger and Hermann Hesse, as they reflect (in a novel, two essays and a short story) on the life and character of Friedrich Hölderlin. Miller’s translation of Titia Brongersma’s Swan of the Well is forthcoming with McGill-Queen’s.
He has published widely on many topics, including John Dryden, William Blake, Titia Brongersma, Ann Radcliffe, Aphra Behn, Elizabeth Simcoe, Friedrich Hölderlin, and John Clare. His imaginative work has appeared in venues such as Ploughshares, Columbia, Brick, Descant, Queen's Quarterly, Canadian Literature, The Antigonish Review, The Fiddlehead, Vallum, Alphabet City, Books in Canada—as well as the transit system of Vancouver, BC. He sits on the poetry board of The Malahat Review, to which he also contributes reviews. Ornithology is among his interests; for many years, he both rescued and sometimes stuffed birds that struck the illuminated skyline of Toronto by the thousands during migration. He also participated in the Ontario Nest Record Scheme. In the past, he twice exhibited paintings and sketches at a Toronto gallery; he still pursues life-drawing, and ekphrasis as a literary form continues to fascinate him. Persistent artistic and scholarly preoccupations are Graeco-Roman antiquity, the eighteenth century (especially in North America, Britain, France and Germany), natural history generally considered, and contemporary literature—notably world poetry.