First published 2019
Marilyn Bowering crafts meditations that bridge personal loss with cultural memory. Her poems move from disappeared figures of a Victoria childhood to the absence of a family dog, weaving connections between literature, ecology, and history. The collection features voices from various identities and time periods, including literary figures like Gogol and Akhmatova who inhabit the poet's mental museum. Bowering treats culture as ecology, creating acts of reconciliation between the natural world and ancestral voices that form mythic bonds between people and place. The environmental crisis appears throughout, never strident but urgent. At the book's heart lies "Woof, at the Door, Woof," sixteen illustrated poems mourning and celebrating Tessa, the author's departed border collie. These verses capture the dog's essence with vivid tenderness. Objects throughout possess an almost magical quality, suggesting potential movement and transformation. The poems awaken connections between literature, nature, civilization, and individual experience, offering both philosophical and spiritual renewal through acknowledgment of what has been lost and what endures.
Genres: literary-fiction, poetry, biography-memoir, 21st-century, environmental-science, cultural
Vibes: atmospheric, intimate, lyrical, thought-provoking
Tropes: elegiac, found-family, meditative
Setting: Victoria
Period: 21st Century
130 pages · Paperback · Mother Tongue