Curious George

Some have called George Bowering a “rear-view mirror guy,” but he’s no such thing. He is looking everywhere, at the world and his pieces of it, with his head slanted and the corners of his mouth raised. Bowering is the grinning boy who turns life over and takes it apart to see if the centre is cork, like a baseball. He’s the guy who treasures the earth — the largest object he’s ever touched — with all the cities and coasts and the room in Rome where Keats died. He’s the man who places memories of his beloved ballpark on a shelf alongside the complete poems of Samuel Beckett. And the one whose “crooked fingers” stroke his father’s dusty felt skullcap. He’s the poet who breaks down in tears at the haunting beauty of Donatello’s Penitent Magdalene (and doesn’t dare try to describe it). He’s the husband whose wife, Jean, makes sure he doesn’t exist on a diet of meat loaf alone, and the father who draws faces on bananas. He’s the writer — past...