ISBN:
9781772012378
Pages: 656 pp
Pub. Date:
October 15 2019
Dimensions: 9" x 6.3125" x 1.75"
Rights: Available: WORLD
Categories
Poetry / POE023000
- POETRY / Canadian
- POETRY / General
- POETRY / Subjects & Themes / General
The serial form allows the trademark playful seriousness of Canada’s inaugural Parliamentary Poet Laureate, George Bowering, to extend and expand, producing poetry that remains compelling, complex, and exciting decades after its composition. Taking Measures, the first-ever collection of Bowering’s major serial poems, includes work from each of the last six decades, offering a career-spanning and revelatory sample of one of Canada’s best-known and most versatile writers. Including such celebrated Bowering texts as Genève, Autobiology, Allophanes, and Kerrisdale Elegies, as well as Baseball, At War with the U.S., Smoking Mirror, Irritable Reaching, Delayed Mercy, Do Sink, Blonds on Bikes, His Life, and Los Pájaros de Tenacatita, Taking Measures shows this acclaimed and prolific author at his experimental and irreverent best. Edited by the award-winning poet Stephen Collis.
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.
A distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian, and tireless supporter of fellow writers, Bowering has authored more than eighty books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography and youth fiction. His writing has also been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian.
Bowering has twice won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize. In 2019 he received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia.
Edited by Stephen Collis
Stephen Collis is the author of six books of poetry, including the Dorothy Livesay Poetry Prize–winning On the Material (Talonbooks, 2010). His memoir, Almost Islands: Phyllis Webb and the Pursuit of the Unwritten, was published by Talonbooks in 2018. He teaches contemporary poetry and poetics at Simon Fraser University. Collis was the 2019 recipient of the Latner Writers’ Trust Poetry Prize, which is given to a mid-career poet in recognition of a remarkable body of work, and in anticipation of future contributions to Canadian poetry.
