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.
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.
