George Bowering, the first Canadian poet laureate, delights in language and in word-play. In Vermeer’s Light: Poems 1996-2006 there are many poems where sound dominates over sense and the theme is language itself. In the title poem, “Vermeer’s Light,” Bowering seems to play with William Carlos Williams’ image of the white chickens.

Vermeer’s light

on a chicken’s head

puts the lie to form,

allows his love

for content

or not.

A section on poems for the alphabet gives each letter a poem. The book also contains a moving section of poems for the poet’s wife of 35 years, who suffered from Multiple Sclerosis and eventually died of cancer, tilted “Imaginary Poems for AMB.” The section “Sitting in Vancouver” seems to have been written in airports, cafeterias, clinics or hospitals, Bowering observing the passersby or the patients as his wife waits to see the doctor. The seriousness of his wife’s illness emerges indirectly. At the gynecologist’s there are “thousands of files/in sliding shelves.” At the airport in Vancouver, as he observes other travelers he plans to “sleep like a lizard/on the plane/back.” The word-choice “lizard,” with its connotation of dehumanization, carries weight in the poem. Bowering chooses words that surprise and are also telling in their color.

A section on Trieste, during the time when Lech Walesa was active in Poland and before the collapse of Communism, focus on tourists, automobiles and descriptions of the city, while underneath the political tensions incubate.

Youngsters are bellowing all day Saturday through

megaphones, handing out pamphlets about helping

the efforts of the Polack pope and Lech Walesa.

We climbed the Giant’s Stairway

and came down through memorial park,

seeing that one family lost a man in World War One

and three men in World War Two. We found

Stephen Deadlist, then we toured

the Old City, and came out in the Piazza of

United Italy, and for the first time I saw an

Italian fountain with icicles hanging from it.

The final section of the book deals with Bowering’s poem for his grandfather, and he tells the story of how he wrote it, drunk, at age twenty-six, disappointed by his girlfriend. As if embarrassed by the poem’s success, Bowering has rewritten it several times. He discusses his rewrites, some of which were done by making a computer-translation of the poem into another language and then back into English. Yet the original poem stills stand in its greatness.

Taken together, the different sections of Vermeer’s Light give a sense of this poet and his feeling for language, its plasticity and its ability to convey meaning—or lack of meaning—as the poet may want. Bowering handles difficult topics with indirectness and implication.

—linda benninghoff