George Bowering Biography

Canadian poet, fiction writer, and critic, born in the Okanagan Valley region of British Columbia, where he grew up; he was educated at the University of British Columbia. Bowering's early poetry, which includes the volumes Points on the Grid (1964), The Man in Yellow Boots (1965), Rocky Mountain Foot (1968), and The Gangs of Kosmos (1969), was strongly influenced by the Black Mountain Poets—Robert Creeley was his thesis adviser in Vancouver. He was a founding editor of the avantgarde Vancouver poetry magazine Tish. Subsequently Bowering has worked in several Canadian universities. Around 1970 he began to produce book-length ‘long poems’; his work in this vein includes George Vancouver (1970) and Autobiology (1972). A prolific writer, he has published more than forty books. His fictional work includes Mirror on the Floor (1967); A Short Sad Book (1977); Burning Water (1980), a deconstructed novelistic account of George Vancouver's quest for the Northwest Passage; A Place to Die (1983); and Taking the Field: The Best of Baseball Fiction (1990) which Bowering edited. Among his other volumes of verse are In the Flesh (1974), Another Mount (1979), West Window: Selected Poetry (1982), and Urban Snow (1992). Later work includes a meditation on Rilke's Duino Elegies, entitled Kerrisdale Elegies (1984), Caprice (1987), Harry's Fragments (1990), and Rain Barrel (1994). His critical writing includes Al Purdy (1970), A Way with Words (1982), and Imaginary Hand (1988).