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Laurel Reed Books - March 04, 2008 - 0 Comments

Some Answers by George Bowering

Reviewed by rob mclennan

All through 2006, Vancouver writer (and former Parliamentary Poet Laureate) George Bowering made it his goal was to write a chapbook a month, a piece a day, with each monthly project using a different construction (or, as he’s called it before, “baffle”). So far, a number of these works have been produced as small chapbooks by No Press (Calgary), Rubicon Press (Edmonton), Pooka Press (Vancouver), above/ground press (Edmonton/Ottawa) and BookThug (Toronto). The most recent of these is Some Answers, produced by kemeny babineau’s Laurel Reed Books out of Mount Pleasant, Ontario. A lovely little publication (perhaps the nicest production that babineau has done so far), each poem responds in some way to a question taken from another poet, responding directly to quotes taken from poems by Thomas Grey, Christina G. Rossetti, William Blake, William Wordsworth, D.H. Lawrence, Alexander Pope, Louis Dudek, Robert Creeley, Percy Bysshe Shelley, H.D., Sylvia Plath, Phyllis Webb, Sappho, William Carlos Williams, Robert Kroetsch and others, writing one a day for thirty days.

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