What is Long Past Occurs in Full Light

Marilyn Bowering’s new book of poems weaves beautiful meditations on absences and loss with personal, local and cultural memories that point to the emergence of the past into the present. The poems awaken transformative interconnections between literature, ecology, civilization, history and personal critique. A story of acknowledgment and restoration is being told from various points of view and identities, from vanished figures from a Victoria childhood, to a missing dog and authors such as Gogol, Akhmatova and a Gaelic bard in their roles as inhabitants of the museum of the poet’s mind.  In line with Marilyn Bowering’s interest in culture as ecology, the poems are also acts of propitiation between the natural world and the old voices that form the mythopoeic connections between people and their surroundings; connections that are foundational to human art and culture.