Giscome Road is a poem of location and its ambiguity, of presence (remembered as name) and its antecedents. It's a road trip (there are maps for navigation) with a jazz soundtrack, riding the edge from Jamaica to British Columbia. It's a "Roots" quest and a metaphysical query. It's about blackness as landscape. And, best of all, the language is exquisite; from the first line, "The song's a commotion rising in the current," to the last, "You never know what name the periphery's going to start with." Giscombe Road is the most intriguing book of "poetry" that I've read this year.

In his travel memoir/meditation, Into and Out of Dislocation, C.S. Giscombe takes us not just back to the Bristish Columbian landscape of his long poem Giscome Road, but also traces the routes of other journeys and the geography of both "home" and "away from home." With Giscombe, the reader wends her way by bicycle, train, auto, boat and rarely by airplane to Oxford, Jamaica, Victoria, B.C., Prince George, B.C., Vancouver, Seattle, Bloomington, IL, Ithaca, NY, etc. The author sets off on long-distance solo bicycle adventures, his guiding principle seemingly always to push further. Giscombe pays little mind to chronology when meditating on his experiences in various locations. All journeys seem to turn back upon themselves, bump up against other times and places, until they blur together into one continuous quest along the particular edges of landscape, of family and heredity, and of cultural and racial complexity. The author's formal task is to research the "facts" about John R. Giscome, the Jamaican miner, explorer and possible relation whose name graces several geographical features near Prince George, B.C. The "facts" that we finally stumble upon, however, are those of visibility and invisibility with their attendant pleasures, accomodations, and responsibilities. Along the way there is much talk of miscegenation, bears, good and bad restaurants, and even Big Foot. This book is a thinking person's delight.