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It's been a few years since Vancouver writer George Bowering had a new collection of poetry, visibly absent during his stint as Canada's first Parliamentary Poet Laureate from 2002-2004, publishing instead everything else, it seemed, than a new collection, including Stone Country: an Unauthorized History of Canada (Toronto ON: Penguin Canada, 2003), his selected short fiction, Standing on Richards (Toronto ON: Viking Canada, 2004), a selected poems, Changing on the Fly, The Best Lyric Poems of George Bowering (Vancouver BC: Polestar Books, 2004), a collection of literary essays, Left Hook: A Sideways Look at Canadian Writing (Vancouver BC: Raincoast, 2005), his memoir Baseball Love (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2006). One could argue that Bowering's poetry production slowed visibly by the early 1990s, when he was publishing a book every year or two for more than three decades previous, before slowing down to a period of years between collections. Still, whatever poetry he was publishing during his period of Poet Laureateship, making him the most interviewed and visible poet in the country, were either reissues/reprints, such as his pennant poem, Baseball: A Poem in the Magic Number 9 (Toronto ON: Coach House Books, 2004) that was originally published by Coach House Press in 1967, and A, You're Adorable (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 2004) that was originally published by above/ground press in 1998 under the pseudonym Ellen Field, or micro press editions of poems such as his pamphlet Lost in the Library (Ellsworth ME: Backwoods Broadsides, Chaplet Series #84, 2004) and the chapbook Rewriting My Grandfather (Vancouver BC: Nomados, 2005). With all of that, it means that his new collection Vermeer's Light: Poems 1996-2006 (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2006) is his first new trade collection of poems since his Governor General's Award shortlisted title His Life (Toronto ON: ECW Press, 2000), with only two other new collections over the decade previous. Collecting a period of ten years of Bowering's poetic output, Vermeer's Light: Poems 1996-2006 includes a number of pieces that have appeared in wayward publications in Canada and around the world, including in Australia's Jacket magazine, the Backwoods Broadside poem, and the entirety of the two sequences that appeared as Nomados and above/ground press chapbooks, as well as shorter poems and sequences from the Vancouver Sun , the Campbell River Writers' Festival, the Canadian Little League championships, and The IV Lounge Reader (Toronto ON: Insomniac Press, 2000).

A substantial and beautiful hardcover edition of over two hundred pages, this could easily have been called a collection of threads as much as any individual collection of poetry, continuing and even furthering various strains, threads, ideas or whatever it is you want to call the rest of the eighty or so books Vancouver author George Bowering has published since the very early 1960s. Continuity seems to be what Bowering is working to achieve as much as anything else, or it could simply be a matter of a series of ideas that have a hard time letting go of the author; does it matter which comes first? Bowering talks about the origins of many of the pieces and continued threads in this collection, in a brief introduction that reads:

These poems were written during a time that brought a lot of changes to my life. In the late nineties my wife Angela, who was already living with multiple sclerosis, got cancer and went through three years of operations before dying in the fall of 1999. We had been married for thirty-seven years.

In the fall of 2001 I retired from my job and settled into a life of reading and writing and watching baseball games.

In late 2002 the Canadian Parliament made me the poet laureate, so my settling was over. After a year of crisscrossing the country, I sold the house I had been living in for thirty years and moved to Port Colborne, Ontario for the second half of my laureateship, taking up lodging at the home of Ms. Jean Baird, and travelling once a week to London, Ontario, where I was writer in residence at the University of Western Ontario. I spent most of my time back east in a wheelchair or on crutches, having broken my hip, the way old folks are wont to do. In the summer of 2004 I induced Ms. Baird to come to Vancouver with me and take up residence among the mossy trees. It is kind of a stupid place for a baseball fan to live, but we do get out on the road every summer.

"Sitting in Vancouver" is a sequence I wrote in the late twentieth century, and responds to my 1964 sequence "Sitting in Mexico."

"A, You're Adorable" was written by Ellen Field, a writing name I often used in the nineties. It was published as an Above Ground chapbook in 1998, and reprinted in 2004, after the publisher found out who Ms. Field was.

"Imaginary Poems for AMB" were addressed to my late wife Angela in the months that followed her death.

"He Is Not!" is of course a micro-translation of Shelley's "Adonais." It is a companion piece to my poem "Do Sink," which was just the opposite - an expansion of a Keats sonnet. Many of the poems in this book were germinated in secret ways. The one for the Gzowski tournament is obvious. "Victor's Secret" is less so-Victor is a dog who channelled several poets, including P.K. Page and Rachel Wyatt, and produced Victor's Verses , published by Outlaw Editions. There are eight tributes to other writers, in a series that has been running in several of my books. These are sentence-poems commissioned for obits or Festschrifts , and there must be thirty of them by now.

"Lost in the Library" was first commissioned by the CBC, then made into a Backwoods Broadside (Maine), and then recreated as a music video with the Duncan Hopkins jazz trio, directed by Elvis Prusic for Blink Pictures and Bravo!FACT.

That other apparent series made of the word "She" followed by a verb in the ongoing present? I hope that it just keeps on going. "She" is my sweetheart, Ms. Baird, and action words refer to her very well, thank you.

The last sequence in this book has had a history. A narrative essay called "How I Wrote One of My Poems" told the story of "Grandfather" and how that anthology piece was written. The essay was published in my memoir A Magpie Life (Key Porter, 2001). By the time I came to delivering a lecture at Capilano College, at the invitation of Jenny Penberthy, my attempts to assassinate that poem had resulted in a longer essay and some strange rewriting of the grandfilial exercise.

Then in 2005, after I had composed eight versions of the benighted poem, Meredith and Peter Quartermain published the result as a nice chapbook for their Nomados Press. That version turned out to be the longest one, with material that added fictional biography to something purporting to be an essay, just as here the essay, with a little less fictional biography, brings a book of poetry to rest.

And you know what they say the rest is.

Much like the way his George Bowering Selected: Poems 1962-1992 was built by editor Roy Miki (Toronto ON: McClelland & Stewart, 1993), a single poem is included as an opening to the book. Almost an echo of the longevity of writing in the poem "My Family's All in Bed" from that earlier selected, this new piece sits before the longer pieces begin, writing, as he has often done, on writing:

Composition

         is composure's lack,
    uneasy setting of items
    side by side,
         a shining fish
    on a counter

    counts, one counts and two
    puts an end to it
    for now.

         Then
    there's another now, and its track
    is for keeping,
         and this
    one, two,
         is how we do it,
    we three.

A sequence of nine poems that all appeared previously together in an anthology, "Sitting in Vancouver" does respond to his "Sitting in Mexico" series. The original series composed after two trips he took to Mexico in 1964 and 1965, and published as the 12th issu*-e of his IMAGO longpoem magazine in 1970, and here he goes again, but sitting in cafeterias, clinics, hospitals and train stations, responding not just to the form of the previous series, but to the period in which his wife Angela was sick, sitting and waiting and writing the first half of a conversation he continued later on in the same collection in "Imaginary Poems for AMB." Writing thoughtful and quick poems while waiting, possibly, the "Sitting in Vancouver" poems, work the same dance of space and wordplay wit, moving from point to point to point that Bowering has become known for, echoing off not only the "Sitting in Mexico" series, but even the points from his previous collection, His Life , writing:

Sitting in Vancouver: UBC Hospital

     In Emergency
         they're all old
             & no hair combed,

     got blue shiny shins,
         harrup, up on bed,
         who knows last time
         they ever read

     like anything, a book?
           Is this a waste of life,
     is this a drum with no fife?

     Is this a revolution
           in the wrong country,

     do they look at you
         askance or not
               at all?

     Were any of them ever tall?

Far from Bowering's suggestion in his introduction, it wasn't my sudden awareness of Ellen Field as George Bowering that caused me to reprint the A, You're Adorable chapbook, but the fact that he himself had outed the pseudonym when he included part of the sequence in his most recent selected poems, Changing on the Fly, The Best Lyric Poems of George Bowering (Vancouver BC: Polestar Books, 2004); I had long known who Ellen Field was, but not before I published her work in The Free Verse Anthology (Ottawa ON: above/ground press, 1993). Since it was a pseudonym he was playing with, I did tell some people who it really was, but said nothing in print, including letters or online, to keep the original purpose of the play intact. There's nothing worse than having a pseudonym wrecked; just look at Montreal poet David Solway, working his Greek pseudonym in some of his most interesting poetry, and being outed by Carmine Starnino almost immediately after the book was out of the gate, causing most readers to dismiss whatever it is he was trying, and succeeding. Some managed to figure out who "Ellen Field" was on their own, with "her" dedication to Wilbur Shoeshoe, the "native poet" that bill bissett published a chapbook by in the late 1960s or early 1970s under his blewointmentpress imprint, only to discover later on that it was Hamilton, Ontario native David W. McFadden.

Bowering is a big fan of following the threads of his own work, and when you've published as much as he has, the threads are innumerable, coming from both his own work, and the work of those in his own library, whether peers or ancient masters. The poems that came from His Life certainly followed certain threads from his own previous works such as Delayed Mercy and Other Poems (Toronto ON: Coach House Press, 1987). My Life is a book of fifteen years - and thirty in the making - a poem for each season, no matter where he was, from "SUMMER 1958. MERRITT" to "SUMMER (WINTER) 1988. CANBERRA." Bowering, sly trickster, retracing thirty years of seasonal steps, going back through not only his own life, but his life with wife Angela, daughter Thea, his parents, friends, students, writing and travel. In short, a life. Taken from notebook entries on equinoxes and solstices, and the arbitrariness of the entries from those dates , certain chords throughout the text repeat, touching in on itself, such as the thread of reworked "Classical / relation makes a family of us all." ("SUMMER 1958. MERRITT") to "Classical re / duction makes a family of us all, / even his happy daughter." ("SUMMER 1980. VANCOUVER") and "Classical re- / lation makes a family of us all." ("FALL 1986. VANCOUVER"). Not only are there threads that run the stretch of the text, but back into previous work, such as into a series of related poems, "Paulette Jiles & others" in Urban Snow (1992), displaying his interest in pieces fixing friends and family in a specific time and place, or back further, to Delayed Mercy , where he took a phrase or foreign point to leap a poem out of it, talking about small family moments. Those thoughts at home writing late night poems, expanding on his localized time even further, from "This long disease, my life / lets me some days stand / & even walk where my eyes / have shown me a path." ( Delayed Mercy , "The Pope's Pennies"). How much an extension, then, from where he sits now (and then) at his west window, writing "This long disease my life / is much the same this year." ("FALL 1977. VANCOUVER"), or "Island, Island, I wish I were no man." ("FALL 1976. VANCOUVER"). Following that, I've long wondered if the poem was deliberately ended before Bowering's wife Angela got very sick, and the "A" in A, You're Adorable might have been his distance (or even an alternate) to begin writing her again. Bowering writes his alphabetical poem through some of the breaks and cadences of the "Sitting in Vancouver" series, or even the "Blonds on Bikes" sequence from his Blonds on Bikes (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 1997).

A

     (now do I really want an indefinite
     Article?)

is for Apple, a pull, an Article
the original Adam could have done
without.

     A dam did it to him, they say,
     damned him, poor man
silly horse,
     to definite
     deth.

O riginal letter, looks forward & up
A the same time, that pull, is the Be
ginning of time.
      I did not even want
to talk About it. I did not
start All this.

      I would have given him
a peach, started the sentence
with a push,
started with a P,
definite-
ly.

Later on, Bowering's "Imaginary Poems for AMB" have echoes of Sharon Thesen's own "Weeping Willow," poems written for Angela Bowering originally published as a chapbook by Nomados in 2005, and subsequently appearing in The Good Bacteria (Toronto ON: House of Anansi Press, 2006). Both poems were obviously written with their own intimate knowledge, as Thesen spent a great deal of time at the Bowering house with Angela before she died. As Bowering begins his own piece for Angela, a woman known as much for her fierce intelligence and gardening skills as for anything:

I do this all the time,
and this
writing in your notebook,

I learn that John Zarelli
wrote a history of Oliver
     before he died

and I say I will
     show it to you -

such simple words, a rush
of real forgetting
because you may have
     known him, or
his daughter, old now

in the local paper, how
I look at the familiar sun
on the apple blossoms -

think how we desired
     to be here in April -

our daughter's eyes, blossoms,
sun on blue mountain's grace.

She saw it this morning,

I am surrounded by
     your female-in-laws,

I could die here,
     there'd be few to notice.

On the other side is Sharon Thesen with her poem for Angela, writing gardens and Thomas Hardy references:

As she lay dying amid the willow branches
a gardener pruned a Moorish vista from a row of trees

and the church across the street gonged with weddings
and with funerals, or the ordinary Sundays with the old
faithful getting out of cars and opening umbrellas

and wings of angels began to fill the room
and crowd out the physiology,
the husband, the daughter

the pile of mysteries on the bed.

In Vermeer's Light: Poems 1996-2006 , George Bowering writes poems that are deeper in thought and larger in scope through the interplay of lyric writing lyric, and the accumulation of a ten year period of "earthly scope" and other writings. As in much of his work, Bowering wears his heart through language, written on his sleeve, writing out the important parts of his thinking and his life, and his thinking life; in this collection, his late wife and his new partner, Jean Baird, as he continually reworks and rethinks his present and his past, and all that has ever come before him.

The Important Stuff on Granville Island

Even when there's no parking on Granville Island
there's poetry.

Even when there's no island at Granville Island
there's Granville Island Lager.

& poets like lager, prose writers too,
they like lager.

Even when there's no beer-drinking poets on Granville Island
there's poetry, or if we're lucky, fudge.

I have a friend who sells fudge on Granville Island,
mmm, boy.

Even when there's no poetry on Granville Island
there's fudge.