In December 2005, stalled on a novel he was writing, George Bowering thought he needed a challenge. By the end of the year he had made a New Year’s resolution: write a poem a day for the 365 days of 2006. While working on Crows in the Wind, in January, he decided each monthly sequence should have a rule: something for the writing to attend to. So for February, each day’s piece had to have one sentence and two stanzas, then off he went; inventing ten further formal monthly compositional frames. As it happened, 2006 became fraught with personal challenges for Bowering—including a second marriage and a death in his new family—but he kept going, never cheating. The result of this uncompromising personal and formal discipline is one of the most fascinating books of poetry ever written.
Initially lacking a “subject,” the book’s metanarrative almost inevitably took the shape of an exquisite poetic autobiography that is at once both intensely personal and profoundly public. In it, among many other astonishments, we discover the deeply ambiguous roots of his father’s favourite folksong; we catch a ?eeting childhood glimpse of Bowering’s young mother, graceful as a gazelle, frozen in mid-stride like a Keatsian art-deco statue by the poet’s innocently Oedipal gaze; a complete history of Cuba in the context of US foreign policy in Latin America that gives an entirely new, but older, meaning to the date September 11; and the roots of tragedy that led to the “Balkanization” of Yugoslavia.
Throughout, the poet’s narrative personae assume the guises of a lifetime, reeling in and out of an ever-shifting “present”: a ?uid “here and now” that swirls over the gravel of a stream alive with recognitions, as all of the events of that imagined life become simultaneously present in their voices.
Short-listed 2011 BC Book Prize: Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize
“[Bowering’s] acute sense of language style and possibility, his ear for words and rhythms, shows a process for literary imagination that is open and generative, and so frequently provocative.”
—Fred Wah
George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate, was born in the Okanagan Valley.
After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering earned a BA in English and an MA in history at the University of British Columbia, where he became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He has taught literature at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University, and he continues to act as a Canadian literary ambassador at international conferences and readings.
…from George Bowering, 1953-1954 and excerpts from My Darling Nellie Grey. Shot for the UVic Torch Alumni Magazine, …
…about various books by George Bowering, including My Darling Nellie Grey, Errata, Left Hook, and Burning Water. There is …
…Belford for Decompositions, George Bowering for My Darling Nellie Grey, and Stephen Collis for On the Material. …
…for the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize for My Darling Nellie Grey. Only yesterday, Bowering was named winner of the …
…Decompositions (Talonbooks) George Bowering, My Darling Nellie Grey (Talonbooks) Stephen Collis, On the Material …
…Bowering‘s most recent book of poetry is My Darling Nellie Grey. …
…pm. George Bowering‘s latest Talonbook is My Darling Nellie Grey. …
…each section of poems. Each month of the result, My Darling Nellie Grey, is being reviewed by Daniel Zomparelli for Geist …
…taking the audience to the very verge of his book My Darling Nellie Grey. Weyman Chan went where no one has gone before, …
…abounded as he read from his series of poems in My Darling Nellie Grey. After the break, Stephen Collis read from his …