Autobiography

Autobiography
by Marilyn Bowering
Beach Holme Publishers

Autobiography by Marilyn Bowering is no easy read. Her poetry doesn't roll off the tongue to inhabit the mind in colloquial speech or thought patterns. Rather, Bowering constantly challenged me to rethink thinking. Her images work to decontruct the natural world I commonly accept as a part of my daily life. She's not a nature poet in the same way as Lorna Crozier, that's for sure. Bowering presents the natural world as passing with a consistent and dark ritualism into the supernatural world. Rife with an aching instability, Bowering's work has a mischevious unpredictability to it. "She goes away to the land of the dead," making me fully aware that the world of the living is always perched unsteadily above an abyss inhabited by the darkly arcane. Bowering's "fascination with the arcane," as Susan Musgrave has noted, is indeed what fuels her work. It's what blends the world of the living and dead and is what made me question the presence of solid boundaries between dark and light.

Her verse pulled me under with deceivingly simple and haunting images reminiscent of the work of Jay Macpherson. In the poem, "She goes away," this is most apparent:

No dog will hear us,
no rooster will crow.
My name is in the dark night.
Let us go to the sea,
and leave nothing behind,
not even a footprint to lead to the waves.

* What will they hear
when they bathe with the horses, put their ears in the sea,
shake them?-

What I felt most strongly in Bowering's work is the silence between her words. This is the space she has created, the breath she has forced me to take, before she plunges me back into the heavy darkness of her poetry. Occasionally, there is a glimmer of the muted colours of dawn, the phosporesence of the living language, but just as surely and as rhythmically as waves crash onto the shore, Bowering once again pulled me under to the world of womb and tomb.

My only complaint is that Bowering's images are sometimes too highly polished and abstract to retain their humanity. Autobiography is supposed to examine "the fluid nature of the Self, its origins, its transience and its evolution in combination with the natural world, the soul and community," however, Autobiography does not entirely achieve this end. Because she is working strongly out of the mythic and the arcane, her work often lacks a tactile, human quality. Although the images she presents are often beautiful and awe inspiring, they are nevertheless untouchable, leaving me at a sad distance.

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