Man of Letters

It’s hard to avoid the word “prolific” when speaking of George Bowering, the writer par excellence of Vancouver. According to his biographer, Rebecca Wigod, the eighty-­three-year-old Bowering has produced 100 books, spanning every genre including lyric and long-form poetry, novels and short stories, memoirs, essays, and popular history — even a young adult novel, Parents from Space. “Sometimes it feels as if I have published more than I have written,” he has admitted in his droll way.

Not every one of those 100 books displays excellence. There is The Dad Dialogues, for example, a compilation of letters that Bowering exchanged with Charles Demers, a much younger papa, about the care, feeding, and adorable doings of their infant daughters. It reminds you of those besotted bores who sit next to you on long flights and insist on showing you baby pictures of their children or grandkids. But Bowering’s talent shines bright in books such as...