The World, I Guess

Author: George Bowering

Publisher: New Star Books (2015)

The World, I Guess is a substantial book, six sections that demonstrate a command of a broad poetic range, a catholic range of interests, and echoes of a lifetime of reading and learning from Pound, Williams, Stanley, and others.

The centrepiece is The Flood, a long, complex, discursive poem whose subject is poesis and whose interest is in the world around the writer. But the book ends with a suite of translations of the modern Canadian poetry canon, from Charles G.D. Roberts and Archibald Lampman to Irving Layton and Phyllis Webb.

While The World, I Guess might be just George Bowering's 36th book of poetry, he's also issued a dozen or two novels and short story collections and another couple of dozen books of stuff he didn't make up: criticism, memoirs, and histories