The World, I Guess

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 GB'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.