George Bowering, Pearl

  

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.

Elee Kraljii Gardiner, sometimes, forest

 

sick and witching

like a day that begins darkly and rises into pattern
so my scape is written
in small solidarity with the diseased elm
buried and bulbous –
            saying not years but this           just this now       ,

                        , this twenty-four      ,       ,       ,

The latest from Vancouver poet and editor (and current 7^th Poet Laureate of Vancouver) Elee Kraljii Gardiner [see her 2016 ’12 or 20 questions’ here] is sometimes, forest (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2026), following on the heels of her Trauma Head (Vancouver BC: Anvil Press, 2018) [see my review of such here] and serpentine loop (Anvil Press, 2016). This new collection is self-described, in part, thusly: “sometimes, forest alternatively rails at and desires a fluid beloved, sometimes forest, sometimes lover, friend, mother, or an absence the speaker years for in herself. But the coastal temperature rainforest continues foresting, existing independently of the speaker’s wants or needs, a place of both refuge and harm. returning daily to the same woods, the speaker notices minute seasonal changes and considers her own internal changes too.” The changes articulate, and her short lyric bursts sit as a kind of constellation around the central core of her subject, or subjects: writing skant, slant, evasive and specifically on and around desire, time, a wealth of trees and the rich life of the forest floor. There is something intriguing about how Gardiner, to date, has composed book-length works, each of which have been shaped around particular subjects; each collection an approach and a response to perception, from the subject of figure skating, writing memories relating directly to her childhood and her mother in her full-length debut to the concussion and recovery poems of her follow-up, and now this ecopoetic around networks, moments, duration and landscape. “try to city / but go boreal,” the poem “cultivated” reads, “at the fence      drip /       rub the pheromone deep / squat and pulse      splatter [.]” Composed during and across the Covid-era, Gardiner’s sketch-poems mark moments across wide distances, offering clusters of lyric that pool and eddy, sit for a bit, and breathe. “come morning,” she writes, to close the poem “in midnight,” “an amnesia step // over strings of viscera // asking guiltlessly, raccoon or coyote?”

Set within a pandemic-era stretch of Vancouver’s coastal temperate rainforest, Gardiner’s ecopoetic responds to more than just the environment, but what the space provides. “sometimes,” she writes, as part of “eluvial,” “forest / I must trust you / more than water / to solve for balance [.]” To open the collection, Gardiner offers this, as her “preamble”:

sometimes, forest was written as an in-situ response to the pandemic and the deadliest weather event recorded in Canada. In June 2021, 619 people died in British Columbia from a week of heat so severe that birds dropped out of the sky mid-flight. In that week of the heat dome, intertidal zones of the Salish Sea reached an excess of 50°C, triggering massive die-offs across species; 70 percent of the populations of bay mussel (Mytilus trossulus) and barnacle (Balanus glandula) perished. Though the head broke, the resultant wildfires, glacial melt, river flooding, landslides, and reduced crop yields have had long-term impacts. As with the pandemic, the toll is complicated and more diffuse than raw data suggests: in Canada, 3.5 million people are living with long COVID, a consequence we are only beginning to recognize. As I witnessed these emergencies, I walked almost every day through the forest thinking about how trans-species and more-than-human networks relate, how they react to crisis, and how they exhibit interdependency and care.

It is interesting, also, how this collection connects to recent work by other British Columbia poets, responding with their own pandemic-era book-length ecopoetic titles around climate, crisis and British Columbia forests, including Kelowna, British Columbia poet Matt Rader’s FINE: Poems (Gibsons BC: Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Delta, British Columbia poet Kim Trainor’s A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here]. Gardiner, in comparison, ramps up an approach to language in its pure form, and the poems of sometimes, forest have such a wonderful thick and rich quality, a mélange of sound and bounce and visual play, offering a layered density of language as thick and teeming with life as any forest floor. “comforted to think you register my footfall in your soil / my weight’s dim thrum-thrum // within soft cacophonies,” she writes, as part of “spit sways,” “piled / in repetition across millennia / four footed, two footed, no footed // in a forest of slither / everything is a desire path [.]” Or, as the poem ends:

how your conifer’s crown feels eternal
            , even if falling      ‘
                        when you sap a pushing emotion inside me

Rahat Kurd, The Book of Z

My review of Vancouver poet Rahat Kurd's The Book of Z (Talonbooks, 2025) is now online at periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics. See her 2016 "12 or 20 questions" interview here.

Drew McEwan, tours, variously

 

A voice might change.
                        From a distance a voice may appear to change.

I see the face of another and recognize a name. 

Support structures an unequal encounter.

                                                                  Name this distance. 

You’re always on the wrong foot, I might say.

Come closer and see. (“a tour, variously”)

The latest from Toronto poet Drew McEwan, following Repeater (Toronto ON: BookThug, 2012) and If Pressed (BookThug, 2017) [see my review of such here], is the long-awaited tours, variously (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a book-length suite structured as a kind of call-and-response between extended lyric sections: “a tour, variously,” “exit strategy,” “a tour, variously,” “arger’s interiors,” “a tour, variously,” “theory of rooms” and “a tour, variously.” “I brace another entryway within a room.” the opening sequence begins, “You frame the performance of a beginning.” Described on the back cover as “a guided tour, a tour of a series of empty rooms,” the open-ended complexity of tours, variously does read as an exploration of space, of being, moving between an uncertainty of rooms. In the first section, a bit further along: “My madness is the madness of sequence.”

Working as an “educator and researcher with a focus on mad, disability, queer, and trans rhetoric,” tours, variously is nearly structured akin to a thesis, following an argument across the length and breadth, layered in lyric instead of prose (reminiscent of titles produced through Essay Press, one might say). “Her theoretical parenthesis capitulates to a / demand for rigour where gravity gives way to / a flex behind apprehension.” she writes, mid-way through the collection. “This description / becomes furniture music.” The ebbs and flows of tours, variously hold an array of threads of awareness around depictions, rhetorical function and narrative gesture. “Without the ‘now’ of standardized speech,” she writes, “the / loiterers drag bruised aphorisms. Or so say the / lawyers on the courthouse’s brutalist concrete / steps. Or so say the courthouse’s brutalist / concrete steps. Either way the difference / amounts only to the distance between arrival / and departure lounges.” tours, variously is composed as a long poem talking out self-aware elements of self and being around language and depiction (“Has my narration become cold and inhuman?”), writing an exploration of betweenness, becoming and having become, having been the whole time, achieving an exploration not of uncertainty but of seeking, plumbing the depths of language into a solid ground.

Suppose autonomy. Suppose a hibernation.
A marker-adjusted room to breathe.
Motivated by an impossible exchange.
A room impassable. Reconsidered in miniature. 

Once horizontal withdraws, the work various access.
Vanishing point delegates a private scale.
Margins trace transitional infestations. (“theory of rooms”)

 

ryan fitzpatrick, No Depression in Heaven

 

 

I’m going to fake a grip on that old gospel ship
Extract a scar across the sky
I’m gonna shit out brinks ‘till Heaven sinks
As I surge this world’s goodbye 

I’ve leveraged circling to total everything
All your debts with me you’ll square
I’m going to make a line that only knows to rise
‘Til we’re bailing out the air 

I’m going to crack my whip on that new condo strip
I’m renovicting all the sky
I’m gonna cry critique ‘til Heaven tweaks
Our mistakes until they’re crime 

It take financing’s taste to bite into the waste
Of spending’s time in prayer
And when that ship inflates, I’ll leave this world with haste
As our failure coats the air (“Hollow Square”)

The latest from Calgary-returned (by way of Edmonton, Toronto and Vancouver) poet and editor ryan fitzpatrick is No Depression in Heaven (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2025), a collection that follows and furthers a more overt Alberta-centred cultural thread, as established in their prior collection, Sunny Ways (Toronto ON: Invisible Publishing, 2023) [see my review of such here]: a collection of longer pieces that included writing prompted by and through Edward Burtynsky’s “massively scaled photographs” documenting and depicting the Alberta Tar Sands. As I’m sure you already well know, fitzpatrick is the author of a wealth of chapbooks going back some twenty-five years, as well as the full-length collections Fake Math (Montreal QC: Snare Books, 2007), Fortified Castles (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here] and Coast Mountain Foot (Talonbooks, 2021) [see my review of such here], as well as their non-fiction full-length debut, Ace Theory, “a book-length essay in fragments about asexuality,” forthcoming in 2026 with Book*hug Press.

In a recent article in the Calgary Guardian, fitzpatrick describes No Depression in Heaven as “a ‘poetry LP’ of improvisatory pieces that works through the history and forms of country music.” Set in two clusters of extended poems, “Side A” and “Side B,” the structure and content of fitzpatrick’s latest plays off the Alberta near-stereotypical ethos of “country and western music”—very different from, say, Dennis Cooley’s Country Music: New Poems (Kelowna BC: Kalamalka Press, 2004) [see my review of such here] or Zane Koss’ recent Country Music (Invisible Publishing, 2025) [see my review of such here], not to mention any other of the multitude of prairie poets over the years approaching bluegrass riffs on the lonesome cowboy or open, empty prairie (numerous of which, we now know, were deliberately-placed ideas across the North American prairie by a variety of racist government agents and agendas, to push First Nations peoples “out of the way” for wave upon wave of settler occupation). And yet, one can see linkages in fitzpatrick’s latest to the poems in Robert Kroetsch’s “Country and Western” section of his Completed Field Notes (Edmonton AB: University of Alberta Press, 2002), each poet offering their own section of lyrics composed in more overt country song-stanza shapes. “It won’t be long ‘til value streaks / Right through White City’s square,” fitzpatrick writes, “With fifty miles of elbow room / On either side to spare [.]”

Of his “TRACK LIST,” each side includes five “tracks” with titles such as “The Whole-Tone slur of the Lonesome Cowboy,” “Dopamine Lasso,” “Empty Craft,” “Waitin’ on a Word,” “These Are the Good Times” and “I Don’t Want to Get Adjusted to this World.” “O empty craft,” begins the extended “Waitin’ on a Word,” “I am because / my little / cowboy hat / knows me, / my slip note / overplinks / explained as / a saintly aged / truck-cab / nostalgia / for cut-out / white nothing / radio space / fade-shuttling / my cloud-gravelled / gut-feels, [.]” Held in their evolving foundations of articulating climate catastrophe and critiques of neoliberalism and capitalism through a language-centred lyric, fitzpatrick’s “poem-songs” target a very particular flavour of western nostalgia, one that could be seen as heavily pushed and favoured by the current provincial government in that particular province. As fitzpatrick writes in their “LINER NOTES” at the back of the collection: “What stuck with me as I listened were country’s conflicting obsessions with traditions and novelty, and with what is and isn’t ‘real’ country. Authenticity in the genre is tied to performance. A character or narrator in any given song needs to be rural poor, live the cowboy life, love America and freedom. It helps if you like to drink and own a pickup (or a tractor).” Interestingly enough, another factor in this nostalgia-element across the traditions of country music fall into population, as in Canada, at least, as it has been within my own lifetime (and fitzpatrick’s as well, they being nearly a decade younger than I), that the population of Canada has shifted from predominantly rural to predominantly urban. And yet, those elements of rural nostalgia run deep, well into the culture. And, after years of attempting other centres, it would seem, ryan fitzpatrick has returned to Alberta, perhaps to confront a history and lineage that couldn’t have been approached in such a way without having spent so much time away. As their end-notes begin:

Somewhere in the middle of 2021, I started listening to the country music of my youth. I grew up in Calgary with the radio on: CKRY Country 105 across two decades where the genre swung from the pop-baiting crossover music of Kenny Rogers to the neotraditionalism of George Strait. Dipping into playlist after playlist on Apple Music and YouTube, and whatever was playing on the radio in my sister Megan’s kitchen. I was amazed by how many songs I actually knew! I wanted to understand what attached me to this genre – a genre connected to a rural, southern US version of whiteness with its pickup trucks and honky-tonks, only some of which spoke to my urban, western Canadian experience. I wanted to know why this music felt so significant for me and what kinds of things it connected me to.