On the surface it seems so simple: His Life, the new book by two-time Governor General’s Award-winner George Bowering, is a poetic memoir, a book-length poem drawn from over 30 years of journal entries. Almost as soon as one begins reading, however, that apparent simplicity vanishes, replaced with something more wonderfully complex.

The poem is broken into about 120 fragments, based on Bowering’s journal entries from the solstice and equinox days of each year from 1958 to 1988. (There’s no astrological import – the days form an arbitrary mnemonic device that goes unremarked on within the text.) There is a vivid, imagistic quality to each entry, and a terseness of language that is reminiscent of haiku, lending a Zen-like immediacy to every detail.

As a straightforward memoir, His Life is a failure: the reader will come away having apparently learned more about Bowering’s life from the biographical note on the book’s back cover than from the 120 pages of poetry within. Yet this ostensible failure points the way to the poem’s ultimate success.

His Life is a memoir that questions the genre itself, demonstrating the facile, trivial quality of mere biographical data when compared with the rich, complex, and contradictory qualities of a life. The reliance on decades-old journal entries as his primary source material allows Bowering to avoid the temptation to reconstruct or interpret his own life, or to present events with the benefit of hindsight (as is the norm in most biographical writing). Rather than pat narrative resolutions, the reader is presented with thematic and biographical motifs, among them hockey and baseball, Bowering’s relationship with his daughter and his childhood hometown, his writing, and the writing of his peers. These issues recur and mutate over time, yet, as in life, remain tantalizingly unresolved. Bowering is to be credited for this achievement, for his bravery and his skill.