New Releases from Talonbooks

A major new collection from our beloved neighbor to the north and Brewers-first-pitch-thrower George Bowering.

In December 2005, stalled on a novel he was writing, George Bowering thought he needed a challenge. By the end of the year he had made a New Year’s resolution: write a poem a day for the 365 days of 2006. While working on Crows in the Wind, in January, he decided each monthly sequence should have a rule: something for the writing to attend to. So for February, each day’s piece had to have one sentence and two stanzas, then off he went; inventing ten further formal monthly compositional frames. As it happened, 2006 became fraught with personal challenges for Bowering—including a second marriage and a death in his new family—but he kept going, never cheating. The result of this uncompromising personal and formal discipline is one of the most fascinating books of poetry ever written.

Initially lacking a “subject,” the book’s metanarrative almost inevitably took the shape of an exquisite poetic autobiography that is at once both intensely personal and profoundly public. In it, among many other astonishments, we discover the deeply ambiguous roots of his father’s favourite folksong; we catch a fleeting childhood glimpse of Bowering’s young mother, graceful as a gazelle, frozen in mid-stride like a Keatsian art-deco statue by the poet’s innocently Oedipal gaze; a complete history of Cuba in the context of US foreign policy in Latin America that gives an entirely new, but older, meaning to the date September 11; and the roots of tragedy that led to the “Balkanization” of Yugoslavia.

Throughout, the poet’s narrative personae assume the guises of a lifetime, reeling in and out of an ever-shifting “present”: a fluid “here and now” that swirls over the gravel of a stream alive with recognitions, as all of the events of that imagined life become simultaneously present in their voices.

ISBN 13: 9780889226340 | ISBN 10: 889226342
6 W x 9 H inches | 416 pages
$39.95 CAN / $39.95 US



Talon also just reissued the classic Robin Blaser book Pell Mell (previously available from another great Canadian publisher, Coach House).

Pell Mell, the middle voice, the syntax meeting its astonishments in its forward stride looking backwards, imagining an image nation where the heart is always torn—to pieces possessed by the other(s). A book so sure of itself that Blaser can begin, after the act of said-and-done, a series called Great Companions. Lesser poets might, and have, called them “masters.” But only because they lack Robin Blaser’s insistence on the audacious ever-present. A scatter of pearls for Aphrodite, and a lovely place to enter Blaser’s life work, The Holy Forest. As to the plot, Blaser himself has said:

“These poems follow a principle of randonnée —the random and the given of the hunt, the game, the tour. Thus, randonnée is another title of this book, written, so to speak, in invisible ink. These poems are also a further movement in one long work that I call The Holy Forest, though that need not trouble the reader before the forest is full grown. Poems called Image-Nations come and go throughout, never to become a complete nation. And Great Companions of the art of poetry, a series which begins to gather here with Pindar and Robert Duncan, will continue until their voices close The Holy Forest. That’s the plot.”

ISBN 13: 9780889103399 | ISBN 10: 889103399
6 W x 9 H inches | 120 pages
$16.95 CAN / $ US


Other new releases from Talonbooks:
Rob Mclennan-Gifts
Michel Tremblay-Blue Notebook
Daphne Marlatt-The Gull



We have very limited quantities of all of these at the moment, so please call or email if you like us to hold or mail you a copy.

And stay tuned for a major Charles Olson reissue from Talon next month!