Writing and Reading, Vancouver, New Star Books, 2019
Writing and Reading features thirty recent essays, ranging from a single paragraph to 12,000 words, spanning the range of the author's curiosity, which includes collecting, difficulty, film, painting, photography, music, and Vancouver's poets from Apollinaire and Blaise Cendrars to the present day. Bowering writes perceptively about his encounters with texts, and writers, including David Bromige, Judith Fitzgerald, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robert Kroetsch, Michael Ondaatje, Joe Rosenblatt, and every book he read in 1967, Canada's centennial year.
Running through Writing and Reading is the theme of reading — and paying attention — and its centrality to any writing practice.
“Acute critical observations that reflect a lifetime of engagement with literature…These essays deserve attention from anyone who cares about how literature is made and works.”—Tom Sandborn, Vancouver Sun
"Bowering is a wolfish reader with eclectic tastes as well as an unflagging writer.”—Nicholas Bradley, The Ormsby Review
Taking Measures, Vancouver, Talonbooks, 2019.
Publisher's Blurb: The serial poem is a hybrid genre, stitching short lyrics together into sequential, long (typically book-length) poems; Bowering’s innovative use of the form, always rooted in an engagement with place, with language, and with the intertwining of the two, shows him at his experimental and irreverent best, his trademark playful seriousness extended and expanded, producing poetry that remains compelling, complex, and exciting decades after its composition. Edited by the award-winning poet Stephen Collis, Taking Measures offers a career-spanning and revelatory sample of one of Canada’s best-known and most versatile writers.
"A beautiful edition and a gift to Bowering’s readers, Taking Measures goes some distance toward realizing that goal. As editor, Collis assembled Bowering’s 'long serial and procedural poems,' which are 'premised on the sort of ongoingness that best suits this poet’s propulsive need to continue writing.’—Nicholas Bradley, Ormsby Review
David in Byzantium, Cobourg, Proper Tales Press, 2019
It was the summer of 1966, you probably weren’t born yet, and I was travelling in a new Volkswagen beetle with the sweetly evil poet David McFadden, eastward in southern Europe. It was the first time either of us had been in the old world, so we were taking advantage of the opportunity to transform our young Canadian lives into legend. He was carrying a book of poems by Charles Baudelaire, and I was carrying an anthology of notable works by English poets. He kept looking up things in my book because, as much as he adored Baudelaire, he could not read French.