As the Matador Says

In 2015, after surviving a cardiac arrest at the age of eighty, George Bowering observed that his life was now in extra innings. A passionate lover of baseball, he meant, of course, that the end could come at any time. That sense of urgency motivated Canada’s first parliamentary poet laureate, twice a winner of a Governor General’s Award, to add in the years since more than a dozen titles (poetry collections, criticism, memoir, novels, and book-length poems) to his already enormous body of work. “The older you get, the less time you have left, so the faster and longer you should be writing,” he declares in Barefoot Gringo, his Mexican travel memoir.

This year, with its publication and that of Pearl, Bowering announced that the game is finally over. “This is, as they say, my goodbye book of poems,” he declares in the preface to Pearl. In a postscript, Jean Baird — Bowering’s wife, helpmate, and caretaker — describes the arduous process of...