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list price: $18.00
edition:Paperback
category: Poetry
published: Feb 2018
ISBN:9781554201457
publisher: New Star Books

Some End / West Broadway

by George Bowering & George F.G. Stanley

tagged: canadian
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 is a distinguished novelist, poet, editor, professor, historian and tireless supporter of fellow writers. He has authored more than one hundred books and chapbooks, including works of poetry, fiction, autobiography, biography and fiction for young readers. His writing has been translated into French, Spanish, Italian, German, Chinese and Romanian. His novel, Burning Water, won the Governor General’s award for fiction and his memoir, Pinboy, was short-listed for the BC National Award for non-fiction in 2013. George Bowering is a two-time recipient of the Governor General’s Award, Canada’s top literary prize, and served as Canada’s first Parliamentary Poet Laureate. He is an Officer of both the Order of Canada and the Order of British Columbia.


George F.G. Stanley is Professor Emeritus of History, Royal Military College and Mount Allison University.
Contributor Notes

George Bowering is a two-time Governor General’s Award winner and the author of at least one hundred books, most recently The Dad Dialogues (with Charles Demers, 2016), The Hockey Scribbler (2016), Attack of the Toga Gang (2015), Ten Women (2015), Writing the Okanagan (2015), and The World, I Guess (2015).

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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