Like the avant-garde musician and writer John Cage, Toronto poet and small-press publisher Jay Millar finds mushrooms fascinating (hence his title, Mycological Studies). Mushrooms offer Millar a tempting metaphor for language and the writing process. In his preface he points out that “to mushroom” means “to develop explosively.” Poetry can mushroom in this way, presenting a sudden startling web of life in an out-of-the way place. An apparently random scattering of mushrooms may really be a network connected by unseen fungal threads.

Mycological Studies is like those conceptualist works of visual or performance art that depend upon the artist’s statement pinned to the gallery wall. Once initiated into the guiding metaphors, though, readers can pick their way through poems that embody Millar’s ideas about mushrooms rather than describing the fleshy fungui. The words and letters may not always communicate in the conventional or “above ground” fashion, but they form networks that suggest subterranean threads, mimicking mushrooms’ growth patterns. Some lines play with incomplete phrases, which the reader’s mind fills in only to find that the poem has already moved on.

On rare occasions an intact narrative emerges, as Millar describes a walk down Annette Street or recalls being chased by schoolyard bullies. A hypnotic and suggestive section entitled “Unidentified Species” offers columns filled with tumbling repetitions of word-patterns.

Mycological Studies continues the Coach House tradition of publishing experimental writing. This is not bedside-table poetry – unless you happen to be a student of poetry, language, or mushrooms. The collection offers itself to readers alert to the possibility of alternative types of order in language.