Some End / West Broadway
- Publisher
- New Star Books
- Initial publish date
- Feb 2018
- Category
- Canadian
-
Paperback / softback
- ISBN
- 9781554201457
- Publish Date
- Feb 2018
- List Price
- $18.00
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Description
A masterpiece of late style and friendship, this volume combines back to back two powerful new works by old masters, George Bowering and George Stanley.
Stanley's West Broadway is a long poem, composed over the past decade, following on Stanley's other long city poems, "San Francisco's Gone," "Terrace Landscapes," and Vancouver: A Poem. Like those poems, West Broadway has embedded in it shorter verse poems that stand on their own.
"West Broadway is a narrative/lyrical work, set along the West Broadway corridor on the West Side of Vancouver. It's a sequence of events, personally experienced but largely uninterpreted, that may take place crossing the street or on the sidewalk, riding the bus, in interiors, or in dreams. Along the way there are versions of poems by Charles Baudelaire and Anna Akhmatova." — George Stanley
Bowering's Some End is a suite of thirty-two poems tracking his recovery from a near fatal cardiac arrest in 2015. Throughout, Bowering's wit, his command of the idiom, and his ironic self-awareness shine through as powerfully as ever.
"I just loved, and still do, the notion of doing a flip book with George Stanley, and took to the idea even before we started trying to enter each other's poems, as we do in this book. Some End continues, in its short length, the formal organization I have been listening to over the past few years and in my recent volumes. I can't say much about the images and arguments of the poems, because i just start going on one and keep going till it shows me when to quit. I thought at first that I was deriving from my late-in-life admiration of John Ashbery, but I wouldn't be surprised if you said sounds more like the procedural thought in George Stanley's recent work. When an old guy such as I says 'recent,' he does not mean just a year or so." — George Bowering
About the authors
George Bowering, Canada’s first Poet Laureate, was born in the Okanagan Valley.After serving as an aerial photographer in the Royal Canadian Air Force, Bowering earned a BA in English and an MA in history at the University of British Columbia, where he became one of the co-founders of the avant-garde poetry magazine TISH. He has taught literature at the University of Calgary, the University of Western Ontario, and Simon Fraser University, and he continues to act as a Canadian literary ambassador at international conferences and readings.A distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian, and tireless supporter of fellow writers, Bowering has authored more than eighty books, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography, and youth fiction. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese, and Romanian.Bowering has twice won the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize. In 2019 he received the George Woodcock Lifetime Achievement for an outstanding literary career in British Columbia.
George Bowering's profile page
Born in San Francisco, poet George Stanley has been living in BC since the early 1970s, first in Vancouver, then in Terrace and then back in Vancouver.
A former instructor in the English department at Capilano College, he has published seven books, including Vancouver: A Poem, At Andy's, Gentle Northern Summer, Opening Day, The Stick, and You. He is the recipient of the 2006 Shelley Memorial Award for Poetry.
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