Beautiful meditations on absences and loss interwoven with personal, local and cultural memories.

This new and remarkable book of poetry weaves beautifully crafted and intuitive meditations on absences and loss, with personal, local and cultural presence and memories. The poems awaken transformative interconnections between literature, ecology, civilization, history and individual study. A story of acknowledgment and philosophical and spirit renewal are told from various points of view and identities; from vanished figures from a Victoria childhood, to missing the companionship of a family dog, on to authors such as Gogol, Akhmatova and a Gaelic bard in their roles as inhabitants of the museum of the poet’s mind. In line with Bowering’s interest in culture as ecology, the poems are also acts of appeasement between the natural world and the old voices that form the mythopoeic connections between people and their surroundings; connections that are foundational to human art and culture.

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.

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