Changing on the Fly: The Best Poems of George Bowering

by George Bowering

Book by Bowering, George

Genres: Poetry

160 pages, Paperback

First published September 30, 2004

About the author

George Bowering was born and brought up in the Okanagan Valley, amid sand dunes and sagebrush, but he has lived in Quebec, Ontario, Manitoba, and Alberta — great sources of hockey stars. Along the way he has stopped to write several books on baseball. He has also picked up Governor General’s Awards for his poetry and fiction, and otherwise been rewarded with prizes for his books, except in his home province of British Columbia. His earlier ECW book, His Life, was a finalist for the Governor General’s Award for 2000. He lives in Vancouver.

Reviews

[Angela · Rating 1 out of 5]

This book really isn't my thing. I haven't read any of George Bowering's work, so why not start here? The selections are taken from twenty-four different collections ranging from 1964-2001. Many of the poems feature people in Bowering's life—wife, daughter, father, poets, and unnamed acquaintances—or else scenes from small town Canada. However, the poems are rarely evocative or emotional. Bowering writes of intimate subjects in a way that is so distant and unadorned.

I expected something more serious from him, which I suppose is my fault. There are quite a few poems that have silly wordplay. He also has a weird love of ampersands and of forming the past tense with a "-t," so you'll see things like smasht & promist & guesst & photographt & cookt & lookt & workt & stopt...& it made me pisst off. Some poems are best enjoyed ironically, such as "The Childhood":

She was always asking did you have a happy
childhood & I was always saying a happy child-
hood I dont know or I suppose so I dont know.
Well she would say would you say you had an un-
happy childhood. I dont know I would say an un-
happy childhood I guess I would say I had an
unhappy childhood but only for a reason & then

(...etc. for 26 lines)

Or "Against Description":

I went to the blackberries
on the vine.

They were blackberies
on the vine.

They were
blackberries.

Black
berries.

I personally hated the longer, more serious poems, especially the last one ("Do Sink") which is a fourteen-part butchering (I refuse to call it an homage) to Keats's "When I Have Fears." There are very few poems in this collection that are enjoyable to read. At least the preface is good. I should've quit reading there.

Poems that I liked:
"Rime of our Time," "The Bigamist," "First Night of Fall, Grosvenor Ave," "My Father in New Zealand."

=4/76 +1 bonus point for the preface (6.6%) poems that I liked.

[giuseppe manley · Rating 4 out of 5]

I can't really dispute the title or criterion for selection as I've only read Bowering in selected works. I will note that I once wrote a fifteen page paper on the final poem in the volume, "Do Sink," and felt that I didn't spend nearly enough time on it. For our purposes here, suffice it to say that the selections throughout the volume were quite enjoyable and ordered nicely. Bowering's work with the long poem is generally his best, and the transition toward more intense serial poems at the end is handled well and an excellent choice: I'm not sure the book would have been better served by being arranged chronologically.

I think the book was good or bad or maybe just okay.