George Bowering’s newest collection covers a decade of the Vancouver poet’s life and work. It was a tumultuous 10 years that saw the painful, lingering death of his wife of 37 years, Angela, his service as Canada’s poet laureate, and his departure from, and return to, his beloved Vancouver.

Of such material, apparently, is very fine poetry wrought. The poems, drawn from sources as disparate as The Globe and Mail, Canadian Literature, and a program for the Canadian Little League Championship, are uniformly demonstrative of Bowering’s skills. The collection itself is far from uniform, however. At the core of the book is the raw, emotional force of “Imaginary Poems for AMB,” a sequence of untitled poems written in the months following Angela’s death. Harrowing and heartbreaking, these pages walk the tightrope of sentiment without falling into sentimentality.

There are a number of tonal shifts through the book, from the impressionistic “West Side Haiku” sequence to “A, You’re Adorable,” the whimsical alphabet book Bowering wrote under the name Ellen Field. Despite the far-ranging subject matter and approaches, the volume is characterized by the terse honesty, purity of voice, and wry humour that are Bowering’s trademark.

Particularly outstanding, even in this impressive company, includes samples of biography (fictional and actual), poetics, response to the work, and eight substantive and distinct versions of the poem is the closing section of the book, a lengthy essay entitled “Rewriting My Grandfather,” in which Bowering chronicles the writing and revision, rewriting and re-envisioning of “Grandfather,” perhaps his most well-known (certainly his most widely anthologized) poem. The essay, originally published in Bowering’s 2001 memoir A Magpie Life, was substantially reworked for a subsequent lecture at Capilano College, and itself. It’s a tour de force, and a window into the mind of one of Canada’s most significant poets. –