Years
He was the boy
watching his mother
paring a big apple at
the kitchen sink,
trying to release the
peel
in one piece.
A year or two later,
whatever
she was doing at the
kitchen sink
window, she tried to
retain her cigarette ash
in one cigarette length.
When he was already
an old man,
he received the news
that she was still alive
at one hundred years.
There’s
a mournful touch to
Vancouver poet George Bowering’s latest poetry title,
Pearl
(Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026), a collection self-described as an
assemblage of “last poems,” named for his late mother, who died in 2016, nearly
three months after her one hundredth birthday. In her “Postscript” to the
collection, Bowering’s wife
Jean Baird describes the process of assisting
George write and edit the poems and assemble the collection, as his eyesight diminished,
writing that “[…] nothing prepared me for bearing witness to George slowly losing
his sight and the
many consequences of it.” What happens when a writer, especially
one so prolific for so long, loses the ability to see, to write, to read? She
writes, a bit further on: “Some of the poems in this collection were written
when George had sight to use his computer. When that was no longer possible, he
wrote poems long hand and very large, and I would type them up. I was now the
one using a magnifying glass to try to decipher the scrawl.”
Regular
readers might already be aware that Bowering’s work has been a touchstone of
mine for some time, a poet I latched onto during my twenties and learned much
from, and a handful of titles I’ve reviewed over the past few years include Good Morning Poems: A start to the day from famous English-language poets (Edmonton
AB: NeWest Press, 2023) [see my review of such here], Soft Zipper (Vancouver
BC: New Star Books, 2021) [see my review of such here], Taking Measures: Selected Serial Poems by George Bowering, edited by Stephen Collis (Talonbooks, 2019) [see my review of such here], How I Wrote Certain of My Books (Toronto ON: Mansfield Press, 2011) [see my review of such here] and MyDarling Nellie Grey (Talonbooks, 2010) [see my review of such here].
“It’s
a bushy book,” Bowering writes, as part of his introduction to this new
collection, “meaning that it’s made up of a lot of singularities. It doesn’t
have a consistency.” Consistency, as Bowering suggests, is important,
especially for a poet well-known for dozens of poetry collections built as
self-contained projects, or, as he’s called them, “baffles.” He’s built a
poetry (and beyond) career through the bricks of individual, self-contained
long poems, book by book by book, although any assemblage of these self-described
singularities isn’t a new structure for him. He has poetry collections that
work as long poems, as projects, but just as adamant a thread through his work
are the collections of loose poems, put together into a singular manuscript of
recent or recent-enough, as a collection of strays. One could go back to In
the Flesh (Toronto ON: McClelland and Stewart, 1974), as he wrote to open
the introduction, “I Never Felt Such Love,” to that slim volume:
The following collection is made of magazine verse
written after I turned thirty. It seems to me to be not of a piece necessarily,
but of a period that was entered upon & is done with. For already in my
early thirties I was no longer writing magazine verse, or occasional verse.
Nearly all the poems I have written in the past few years have been a book
long. When I’m kidding around I refer to this present as my symphonic period.
But not really kidding—you know that.
I’m
reminded of Michael Ondaatje’s variation on Jack Spicer’s mantra included in
his introduction to The Long Poem Anthology (Toronto ON: Coach House
Press, 1978): the poems can no longer live on their own than can we. It would
seem that Bowering has always composed stand-alone orphans, eventually
clustering them together every so often into book-length manuscripts to keep them
out of the cold. One could point to further volumes such as The Catch (McClelland
& Stewart, 1976), Another Mouth (McClelland & Stewart, 1979), Smoking
Mirror (Edmonton AB: Longspoon Press, 1982), Urban Snow (Talonbooks, 1992) and the more recent Teeth: Poems 2006-2011 (Mansfield Press, 2013) [see my review of such here] and Could Be
(New Star Books, 2021) [see my review of such here]. It feels
quite a trajectory of Bowering regularly gathering his orphans, consistently inconsistent,
one might say. Most readers wouldn’t have noticed, most likely, due to how many
other long poem poetry titles of his were appearing in print around and through
the same period, obscuring this particular thread of his work. Many writers
might have one or two collections of strays, or even a career’s worth, but
George might have more than a dozen, buried in the seventy or eighty other
poetry titles he’s published since the early 1960s. These are Bowering’s
occasional volumes of occasionals, poems that didn’t necessarily fit together
but were assembled thus, needing (one might say) a house of their own. As the
preface to The Catch begins, offering:
Any collection of verse
is really a recollection. The mind in composition is a gatherer, a net dropt
into a river or spread upon the sea. In one’s early years of learning to write,
the collection may be a springing from consciousness, out of the inconstant
world of external surprise. One Sunday I was driving past some retirement
apartments, & saw two old women in full Salvation Army regalia getting into
a car that bore a huge bumper sticker reading: HELL’S GATE. A few blocks to the
west I drove by an old folks’ recreation place with a block-long sign that
declared: TERMINAL CITY LAWN BOWLING CLUB. A true story a satirist such as
Earle Birney might have made much of.
For
Pearl, the book is assembled as sections, some as short as a single, one
or two page poem: “Divergences,” “Writing Recibiendo,” “How I Learned, Am
Learning: An Essay,” “Some Last Poems,” “David Robinson,” “Pearl,” “Stuart
Ross,” “Light Verse,” “Kent Johnson” and “Life Sentences,” with preface by the
author and “Postscript by Jean Baird,” Bowering’s spouse and co-conspirator.
Some poem-sections sit as prose poems, others as clusters of shorter lyrics. There
are poems for friends, a process he’s been composing for decades, and
throughout multiple collections, stretched out a bit here, from the purely
single-poem to the chapbook-length cluster. There are echoes, as well, of the
short, first-person poems that he composed through Teeth, and even a
nine-part sequence referred to in its title as an “essay,” offering a cadence
of visual cadence and line-break comparable to “Desert Elm,” Baseball: A
Poem in the Magic Number Nine (Coach House Press, 1976), Delayed Mercy &
Other Poems (Coach House Press, 1986) [see the essay I wrote on such here] and
“Do Sink.” As the sequence begins:
Greater than his brother
Joe,
Dominic DiMaggio
had signature
octagonal centre field
wire-framed
eyeglasses.
I didn’t have my specs
yet, but I agreed with
the Fenway
song, knowing objectivity
might
get you somewhere in
baseball
business, but look, we
Red Sox
swim in caramel-thick
sentimentality.
People,
old and young, think they
know
something, discount us
for
writing poems about
baseball.
The
Romantic Poets and baseball and his mother, as Bowering gets as close to the
bone on his life’s work through poetry as might be possible in a single
collection, attempting something fresh by moving as much back into his own
history as into the future. It is interesting that Bowering’s “Phil Hall”
poems, produced in 2025 as a chapbook by Stuart Ross’ Proper Tales Press [see my review of such here], don’t appear in this collection. It is interesting,
also, the framing and feature of the author’s mother, given the section of her
poems but a slice of the overall collage of this collection, very different,
say, than Winnipeg poet Dennis Cooley’s book-length long poem for his own
mother, Irene (Winnipeg MB: Turnstone Press, 2000) [my review of such
buried in the Globe and Mail online archive]. What one might say about boys and
their mothers, perhaps. There are further examples, to be sure. Bowering’s
mother purposefully sits at the centre of this assemblage of clusters, one
might suppose, around which all else swirls. Or, as the piece “Stuart Ross”
begins, writing:
The first time I laid
eyes on Stuart Ross was from the north shore of Slocan Lake.
Where a kayak hove into
sight.
Wait, I murmured to
myself, who is the gink with the curly white hair who is plying that
double-headed paddle?
Can it be the Ontario
poet who had to stop his car high in the West Kootenay highway because he
realized that he had been driving with his eyes closed by abject fear for
twenty kilometres?
Sure enough. I watched
the figure plying his craft across the lake, and I was filled with envy.
A sin, don’t you know?
What
became the final chapbook by Saskatchewan poet John Newlove (1938-2003), THE
TASMANIAN DEVIL and other poems (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1999;
twentieth anniversary edition, 2019), a baker’s dozen of new and previously
uncollected poems, can be read as pieces that each correspond neatly to a
thread of Newlove’s own work to that point: the hitchhiking poems, the sonnets,
the epistolary poems, and so on. Through Pearl, Bowering offers a
sprinkling of some of his own structures and concerns, from elements of reading
history to the Romantic poets, peers and baffles, first-person observational
moments, sly jokes and asides, and character studies. As begins the poem
“Carol,” a piece composed for his friend Carol Reid, the recently-late widow of
Vancouver poet Jamie Reid (1941-2015): “My friend Ian Dunne / made a candlelit
shrine to the poet T.S. Eliot. / Then he died on a highway in Ontario. / So I
published a poem about him in The Atlantic. / Soon I met his little
sister, / who was wearing his beautiful face, / and before I knew it, she
married / my friend Jamie Reid, the poet, / who later died at a keyboard of his
choosing.” Inasmuch as these poems are poems, Bowering’s pieces throughout this
collection exist as responses: to his mother, his friends and his reading, as
well as to any particular experience, caught in the moment. One hopes these
poems aren’t purely last, of course, for such a curious, expansively-playful
and engaged writer and thinker as Bowering, but the signs are there, and he and
Baird have done a worthy job of putting such an assemblage together. While one doesn’t
wish for a closure, it is a worthy one, and a book that leads off into all the
directions that had come before.
A Spoon
A spoon
on a table
that’s where
I sit down
on neither.
