BY GEORGE, THESE ICONS JUST GET BETTER WITH AGE
Poets’ reflections dwell on death and loss, love and desire, and comforts of literary friendship
Some End/West Broadway George Bowering and George Stanley New Star Books $18, 105 pp.
In Some End/West Broadway, their just published “tumble book” from New Star, Canadian poetry icons George Bowering and George Stanley present a compelling argument for our continued attention to their currently unfashionable genre.
The tumble book format is not entirely new, having a long history in the science fiction products of Ace books in the 1960s and ’70s. New Star revived this format when it published Andrew Struthers’ 2017 comic masterpiece The Devil’s Weed/The Sacred Herb and it works as well for the sorrowful and autumnal reflections of two master class poets as it did for Struthers’ smoky humour.
The publisher calls joint publication a “masterpiece of late style and friendship,” and that’s fair comment.
Bowering, who served as Canada’s first poet laureate and Stanley, winner in 2006 of the Shelley Memorial Award from the American Poetry Society, are both men of a certain age, as the French so delicately put it, and their sophisticated lines dwell on death and loss, love and desire and the comforts of
literary friendship. They weave in and out of each other’s lines, sometimes explicitly, (as when each of the poets includes a letter/poem dedicated to the other) and sometimes as the imagined first reader of new work, a kind of perfect audience for an old man practicing a dying art from the edge of his own death.
Sound grim? Not at all. Both Bowering and Stanley write lines that are dense with thought and literary allusions, but grounded in closely observed physical detail. And the music of the language is persuasively beautiful.
No one who reads Stanley’s poems about West Broadway will ever see that quotidian Vancouver cross street in quite the same way. Its mundane details of cross walks and store fronts, young lovers and panhandlers, book stores and pastry shops are all illuminated by Stanley’s intelligence and love of language.
And Bowering’s short poems all resonate with his own distinctive thought and tone as he, too, moves from the observed details of the physical world and the body to more abstract reflections. His short comic turn on The Future of Canadian Poetry is worth the price of admission all by itself.
The poems in this small but beautifully produced volume all work as stand alone pieces, but taken together they are a lovely record of a friendship steeped in poetry and the bittersweet wisdom that comes, if one is lucky, with old age.
Recommended for adult readers. Tom Sandborn works and ages in Vancouver, as he has since 1967, and he is comforted by the idea that old age can generate poetry too. He welcomes your feedback and story tips at tos65@telus.net