news | Monday March 30, 2026

Pearl Has Landed!

We are delighted to announce that Pearl by literary icon and Canada’s first ever Parliamentary Poet Laureate George Bowering has landed! The making of a poem is like the making of a pearl – you take something gritty and create a jewel. This collection sprawls in search of the next glimmering insight, tugging at different threads with a multifarious large-heartedness. This is a collection holding both levity and depth in its pages.

From “A Woodsy Wish”:

“Whose words these are I wish I knew.
I’d like to toss him in the slough.
If they’d been written by a horse,
I do not think they’d be much worse.

The terza rima is a snooze.
My crowd would give it three loud boos.
And all the dumby dumb de dumb
would make them ask, who is this bum?

The guy can hear a flake of snow;
with such an ear, where does he go?
To where you look at jumping sheep,
iambic numbers of his sleep.

To sleep, perchance to clip clip clop,
till you don’t think he’ll ever stop.
With miles to go and go, of course,
you’ll wish he’d fallen off his horse.”

and an excerpt from “Earth”:

“He found her mother’s grave
in a forlorn windswept cemetery
in middle Alberta,

her father saved the headstone
money for something else,
nice guy.

He got a photo of her mother’s
mother’s grave in a lovely
Mennonite graveyard in Oregon.

He leaned on his cane
while someone scraped the snow
and laid her with her own husband.

This is what newborn
children are for.”

Touching, ribald, and cheeky, Pearl reflects on a life well-lived and well-written. Get your copy of Bowering’s final poetry collection here.