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PAUL E NELSON

I got this in the mail last week from New Star Books of Vancouver, BC:

Actually, it was addressed from Point Roberts, WA, a little strip of land, a peninsula actually, south of the 49th parallel, and because of the terms of the Oregon Treaty of 1846, part of the U.S.   A smart move by New Star to save some Yankee dollars on mailing costs. And it shows how poets can be on the top of their games at an age when most of their contemporaries are being moved into “care facilities.” They are both in their early 80s.

& this is a book with no back! A “flip book”, read it from one end it’s Stanley and the other end it’s Bowering. And Stanley had his major health scare a few years ago, prostate cancer and wrote about some of the ramifications of that in After Desire. (See my interview with George Stanley on that here.)

Bowering from the get-go in the new book is referring to his recent health challenge of a heart attack and being in a coma. Of course, he does not come out and say “coma” but writes that his brain has come out of the “ice box.”

You can get a sense of the friendship of these two poets when you listen to Bowering’s Two Bits on the Green Guy.  And listen to an interview with Bowering done a few years ago.

In his review of the new book, Rob McLennan writes:

I find this new double collection by Vancouver poets George Bowering and George Stanley fascinating, a dos-à -dos flip book made up ofBowering’s “Some End” and Stanley’s “West Broadway”(Vancouver BC: New Star Books, 2018). With each section running roughly forty pages in length, both Bowering and Stanley write in and around their Vancouver geographies and concerns, from aging—Stanley’s “Blood is toxic to the retina” from the poem “5,” or Bowering’s “Does it bring any solace or calm to you / to know the sun is mortal, too?” from “Bright”—to  the ins and outs of reading, friends and their immediate locales…

And McLennan notes Stanley’s take on aging in the new book:

Why is this age worse than all those preceding?
Because deranged by greed and desirous of pleasure,
we borrowed against the cancer that was eating us,
the wound we could not close.

Want to see two of the best poets in this bioregion (and the planet) at the top of their games? The launch of the book is Friday, March 30, 2018, at the People’s Co-op Bookstore, 1391 Commercial Drive in Vancouver. Thank you George and George and New Star.