What’s Marilyn Bowering Reading?
I have been re-visiting poets, re-reading fiction by the late Rachel Wyatt, and slowly absorbing Thunderclap: A memoir of art and life & sudden death (Chatto & Windus) by Laura Cumming. Mona Fertig’s new book of poetry, Islander (Mother Tongue Publishing), is her first for many years. It is gentle, healing work, the poems plain with the rhythms of an islander’s life and yet attuned to close study of its people and the natural world.
“The kettle whistles / I pour the black coffee / into my // red clay mug / The aroma eases out the night / It won’t // always be this dark.” (“After the Snow”)
This is work soaked in time and inclusive in its range through experience and questions guided by Fertig’s intelligent clear-eyed view. It is lovely to read aloud and to re-read and access hope.
Adam Zagajewski’s work is often nearby: I pick up his Without End: New and Selected Poems (Farr, Straus & Giroux) every few months for love of his lines on childhood and cities and friendship and the joy and despair of European art and history. He is clear-sighted, too. His questions are large and troubling, his poetic duty is to record terror, thought and beauty:
“Clearly nothing links enlightenment / and the dark pain of cruelty. / At least two kingdoms exist / if not more . . . And where does joy come, and where / does nothingness go? Where is forgiveness?” (“A Talk with Friedrich Nietzsche”)
I find a trace of his presence in a poem of mine recently published by “The New Quarterly” although I had been writing with Lorine Niedecker and her book My Life By Water in mind. She has stayed with me as a literary poetry friend for decades. I know, as she does, what it is to live mediated by a watery world; and I hear in her poetry themes and variations reflecting the Pre-Socratic philosopher Thales who considered water to be the essence of all things.
These books keep company with me as I turn the pages of Thunderclap, a book I might never have read if it hadn’t been sent as a birthday gift by my cousin Linda. Whenever I visit her, we go to galleries. With her I have seen dozens of exhibitions including “Rembrandt’s Self-Portraits” and “Picasso’s Picassos”. In these and other shows that fore-front the artist, the maker is present as an ongoing creative process. Thunderclap is a memoir of Cumming’s father, an artist who went blind in early middle-age; her own life-long engagement with Dutch painting; and a pursuit of the mysteries surrounding the 17th C Dutch painter Fabritius who died in an explosion known as the Thunderclap, that destroyed the city of Delft. She tracks him and his contemporaries through their literal points of view, identifying how and when and where and why they saw and painted as they did. Her pursuit of all these matters gathers force, joining “All we can hold in the mind in the end.” It is a beautifully written book: just one of its gifts is that along with its author as she journeys, our eyes are “sharpened.” I have already begun to re-read.
The last book I will mention is Rachel Wyatt’s Street Symphony (Coteau). Rachel died July 7th. I wish I had taken time to re-read these stories earlier. Her blend of humour with a somehow compassionate skewering of human foibles, is the reader’s mirror. She shows us not only how to look up close at where we are wounded and where we draw blood, but to see through the innocent and not so innocent deceptions of contemporary lives. Rachel is our Barbara Pym and a Jane Austen of the inner voice – her characters so conscious of their narrative that they betray their motives, however hidden from themselves, in every word.
Marilyn Bowering is a poet and novelist who lives in Victoria BC. She was the winner of the 2023 Ruth and David Lampe prize for poetry. Her most recent book is the non-fiction literary investigation and memoir, More Richly in Earth, A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod (MQUP 2024).
Photo by Karolina Grabowska on Unsplash