Talonbooks, 2006

Read by Jakub Stachurski

I haven’t the right to comment on Vermeer’s Light, a compendium of George Bowering’s work of the past twelve years. How does one critique a man who, having published over forty works in verse and prose, remains an imaginative force, his trademark humour and painful honesty intact, his present generosity with said work rarely seen in any art form. Perhaps I’ve been nose-deep in Canada’s youngest and brightest too long—some of whom occasionally mistake a calculated, workshop-germinated poem for a successful one—as Bowering’s generosity and willingness to show the imperfect process of his verse left this reader startled. The volume exhibits the poet’s vulnerability across every stratum, from the revelatory “Imaginary Poems for AMB” series, in which Bowering converses with his recently deceased wife, to “The PGI Golf Tourney Poetic Address and Apology for Same,” in which the poet swallows his palpable discomfort with the event and coughs up stanzas like:

Let me introduce myself, a lesser poet
sponsored for this occasion by Petro-Canada;
call me Dick Assboy, get me on Letterman.

A precisely penned series, West Side Haiku, rests next to an elegy in heroic couplets for a fellow poet, next to slant rhyme most rappers would nod their heads to. Not all of the concepts and experiments work, but the abundance of finely tuned, inspired verse paints any missteps as hearty, necessary steps in the pursuit of craft.

The collection is topped off with “Rewriting My Grandfather,” a telling essay in which Bowering describes the process of writing his most anthologized poem and the decades of frustration it has provided him. The frustration leads to a series of experiments on the piece, and Bowering treats his words as anything but precious. He works the poem through some of the standard poetic constraints, translating My Grandfather into sonnet form, or taking the nouns, verbs, and adjectives, and constructing a version of the poem out of their antonyms. Alternately, he translates the poem into French, then German, and back to English. He translates into Spanish and then back again, using the imperfect digital translation engine Babel Fish©. Even these seemingly haphazard exercises provide the imaginative reader with revelations—the sparkling, leftover Spanish, “santo santo main santo” and how it pierces through the verse, the accidental assonance of digital verse manipulation. His playfulness in tearing down and rebuilding “My Grandfather” is a fitting conclusion to the book.

Vermeer’s Light is not a book you read through once. I can imagine picking it up for years to come, the verse a constant stream of newfound meaning, inspiration and incitement for my own work.