The World, I Guess

The World, I Guess is a substantial book, six sections that demonstrate a command of a broad poetic range, a catholic range of interests, and echoes of a lifetime of reading and learning from Pound, Williams, Stanley, and others. The centrepiece is “The Flood,” a long, complex, discursive poem whose subject is poesis and whose interest is in the world around the writer. But the book ends with a suite of translations of the “modern” Canadian poetry canon, from Charles G.D. Roberts and Archibald Lampman to Irving Layton and Phyllis Webb. While The World, I Guess might be just GB’s 36th book of poetry, he’s also issued a dozen or two novels and short story collections and another couple of dozen books of stuff he didn’t make up: criticism, memoirs, and histories.

AUTHOR

George Bowering

George Bowering was born and brought up in the Okanagan Valley of Pinboy. He published his first book of poems when he was 28. Since then, he has published 100 or so books and chapbooks, won Governor General’s Awards for his poetry and fiction, was the first Parliamentary Poet Laureate of Canada, and has received both the Order of British Columbia and the Order of Canada. He now lives a few steps from where he lived as an undergraduate in Vancouver, British Columbia.