‘A road / called curiosity’

Pearl
by George Bowering

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2026
$19.95 / 9781772017137

Reviewed by Al Rempel

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Pearl is George Bowering’s latest—and last—book of poetry, and while it’s intimidating to review the end of such a prolific legacy of over one hundred books spanning poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, a legacy whose roots reach back to the Black Mountain poets that in turn spawned TISH magazine (est’d 1961) and influenced, in various ways, much of Canadian poetry since, Bowering’s poetry itself is not intimidating. He invites his readers in. 

Playfully serious, raucous and ribald, light-hearted and “heavy” (in the ‘70s sense), Pearl is the final note in a symphony that rings out long after the applause has ended, and the musicians have packed up their instruments and left. Pearl is full of wisdom, full of beautiful gems, and so earns its title, but it also pays homage to Bowering’s mother, Pearl, in a poem appropriately placed at the centre of his book. 

As explained by Jane Baird, Bowering’s partner, Bowering’s eyesight has deteriorated to the point that he can no longer write, so Baird laboriously read aloud to Bowering each poem and each edited version; otherwise, this book would never have come to fruition. We are thankful for her work.

Besides being a tribute to his mother, Pearl acknowledges the many influences on Bowering’s life and writing: the old masters, poet-friends and publishers, and all the books he’s ever read. 

Before “Pearl,” the poems—though Bowering refers to the thirteen pieces as a single poem—is a section titled Some Last Poems. These are a sheaf of newer poems that propelled Baird into action as they languished on the dining room table, Bowering frustrated that he couldn’t read what he had just written a few days earlier. It begins with a prose piece, “A Letter Instead—For Larry Eigner.” A sly ploy, perhaps? A diversion? It has the effect of a koan, revealing and hiding at the same time: “How many front steps have I stood on,” the narrator says, “how many times have I gone home and written a letter instead?” Most of the poems that follow are spare, some simply recollections of a conversation or a “petit moment”; “Dear Earth,” has the word-play reminiscent of ee cummings: “Dear earth / death is not depth / nor here early.” In these last poems of Bowering, we are brought into his home, into his mind, and into his heart. 

After “Pearl” is Light Verse, sandwiched between stories of friends Stuart Ross and Kent Johnson. The poems are playful, rhyming riffs on Robert Frost’s work: “Whose woods are these? I think I’m lost. / I’d better go and read some Frost,” or “Whose woods these are? Who gives a fuck? / I’ll rip right through them in my truck,” a poem that ends with, “And we have promises to make. / And stanzas that we just half-bake, / Or poems so obviously fake.”

Before Last Poems is a long poem (ironically?) entitled “How I Learned, Am Learning: An Essay,” that plays beautifully across the page like some of Bowering’s earlier work. (I recently inherited a copy of rob mclennan’s Stanza: Issue 12 with Bowering’s “Blondes on Bikes: 1-20.”) Bowering takes the game of baseball and runs with it, as he explains in the proceeding piece “Writing Recibiendo” with his father’s advice: “receive the ball, don’t fight it.” Here, “Baseball is too easy / an allegory, poetry / is not, / Mexico is not,” and “Right now, I’m waiting for this piece / to tell me where I went wrong.” Wise advice for any poet. 

Pearl opens with a series of poems called Diversions, which, like a glosa, begins with a quote from a poem, but then Bowering takes the wheel, and the poem diverges wherever the lines take him. For instance, from Coleridge’s “Frost at Midnight,” “the frost performs its secret / ministry…” spins off into “…around my heart, // this organ cowering where its shelter / so long comforted.” Or from Robert Southey’s “Elinor,” “Once more to daily toil – and more/to wear…” continues “…lorn thoughts at the table / notions of immortality,” ending with Bowering’s signature and often self-deprecating humour, “and now look at the / difference your work has made. And / mine, hardy har.” We don’t have the space here to see how each divergence plays off their original, only to say that they are a string of pearls, ending with the poignant poem, “Grant Me Just One Summer,” which diverges from Friedrich Hӧlderlin’s “To the Fates.” Listen to these lines: “All / right, I must accept/whatever you toss my way, // a gesture without care, / a finger pointing down a road / called curiosity.” 

Bowering titles the book’s final section Life Sentences, a wonderful long poem of standalone sentences that are part memoir, part confession, and part list. (Echoes of Ron Silliman’s work?) Bowering loves collecting things—baseball hats, comic pins, lapel pins—and he recorded every book he ever read since about the age of twelve. So, interspersed throughout the poem are lines like “when he was forty he liked to read Gertrude Stein, James Shuyler, and Erin Mouré.” I love the rhythms that Bowering creates with Life Sentences, as sentences pile up upon each other, and the glimpses we see into Bowering’s public and private life, a long and rich life, well-remembered. 

Pearl, the centrepiece of Bowering’s book, comprises page-length poems, robust in craft and peppered with his wry humour. “In the Car,” has two brothers arguing in the backseat: “After a short silence in the car, / his mother said / she liked it better / when they were talking about / the hemisphere.” Or in “Geography and Poetry,” the hilarious lines: “Baptists and Mennonite / became poets / once they got over / the border,” which are perhaps funnier to me because of my Mennonite heritage. And in “Earth,” the sardonic: “her father saved the headstone / money for something else, / nice guy.”

In his preface, Bowering states that “Pearl is not a book of poems, exactly. It’s a poetry book, in other words, a book that perhaps is interested in the making of poems,” and he’s right, there is a lot of “about writing” that goes on here, along with the personalities, events, and books that enriched his life—and, lucky for us—now that its written, can inform our own writing, reading, and thinking about literature. But there are also great poems here, and great lines, luminescent with a pearly sheen, and their beauty embedded in all the muck of our messy, wonderful lives.

Al Rempel‘s previous books are Sprocket, Undiscovered Country, This Isn’t the Apocalypse We Hoped For, and Understories, along with a handful of chapbooks. He has a new book of poems with the working title, Buckhorn, forthcoming with Caitlin Press in 2027. See alrempel.com for more information. Al teaches high school students in Prince George, on the beautiful, unceded territory of the Lheidli T’enneh.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors: Trevor Marc Hughes (nonfiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster