Echos of Frederico García Lorca, Yiannis Ritsons, and Rumi add exoticism to this poet's deceptively simple style. Combining confession with analytical rigor, most of these poems are variations on classic themes, but they are driven by the particulars of politics, love, and family life. As the poems progress, repeated symbols'such as cars, coats, cups, rooms, bees, and roses?begin to hint that the poet has a secret recipe for contentment: home and hearth, travel, warm weather, and a belief in human growth.

Marilyn Bowering has had two previous volumes of poetry nominated for the Governor General's Award: Autobiography and The Sunday Before Winter. The former also won the Pat Lowther Award. Her novel Visible Worlds received the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize and was shortlisted for the prestigious Orange Prize. Bowering is also the author of Human Bodies: New and Selected Poems and the novel To All Appearances A Lady. She lives in Sooke, British Columbia.

Marilyn Bowering's profile page

"To read Bowering is to fall into the mystical hands of her words; she never betrays our trust."  “Susan Musgrave, author, What the Small Day Cannot Hold: Collected Poems 1970–1985

"Haunted by life . . . most tellingly, in the ghosts that seem unwilling to disappear simply into absence, silence, and the past tense."  “Quill & Quire

"A powerful argument for love itself."  “Books in Canada