Bowering’s extraordinary ability balances throughout Human Bodies the demands of both immanence and transcendence, knowledge and mystery, whence and whither—the demands of both what we perhaps may comprehend here but only imagine somewhere just beyond.
David Jarraway, Arc Poetry Magazine
Autobiography
1997 Governor General’s Award nomination for poetry
1997 Pat Lowther Award
“Bowering’s free-falling imagination spins through the cosmos… Every line is quotable.”
— The Georgia Strait
“Bowering writes of love with an understanding that it is the driving force interconnecting all humans, and that the empathy we need to understand each other can open a door to that love.”
— Jay Ruzesky (Event Magazine)
“Marilyn Bowering’s new collection, Autobiography, reaches both the intellect and the emotions with earthy, sensuous poems that illuminate the spirit… To read Bowering is to fall into the mystical hands of her words; she never betrays our trust.”
— Susan Musgrave (The Vancouver Sun)
“This [Autobiography] is one of the best books of poetry in our time… Read it again and again.”
— Harold Rhenisch, The Milestones Review
Love As It Is
“Bowering’s writing is enough to renew one’s faith in the simple strength and beauty of well-crafted poems, or even that such writing still exists… she writes with the subtle, fluid grace of a true poet, exploring the complexities, frailties and beauty of love and passion.”
— Rob McLennan (Ottawa X Press)
“…a brilliantly kaleidoscopic work of art.”
— Allan Brown (Quarry Magazine)
“…finely wrought and… a powerful argument for love itself.”
— Sandra Nicholls (Books In Canada)
Anyone Can See I Love You
“Taken inside Monroe’s sensibility, the reader watches transfixed as Norma Jean, in creating the Monroe legend, also creates transcendent moments of beauty in which love shines out, as if from Eden… Anyone Can See I Love You is a powerful, edgy book which moves continually between white and dark, art and life.”
— Ronald Hatch, Vancouver Sun
“As always, Miss Bowering’s writing is simple, spare, precise… she capture(s) Monroe’s intriguing combination of sinfulness and purity, narcissism and expansiveness.”
— Terry Johnson, Alberta Report
“Bowering remarkably manages to speak with the voice of Marilyn Monroe… Like their subject, these are deceptively simple, evocative poems.”
— Mark Lowey, Calgary Herald
Grandfather Was a Soldier
“Bowering’s poetic elegy… recalls the old experiences through the memorials and the relics and the modern landscape that now refashion the world of battles seventy years ago. In her portrayal… are blended the living and the dead in a world steeped in the supernatural, so that whoever exists there in bodily form and whoever is already changed utterly are scarcely distinguishable… Bowering(’s) meditation… is asking what humanity’s destiny is and what we are fit for.”
— Michael Mason, Canadian Literature
“This year’s sadly shattered ritual of Remembrance gave us… Canadian writer Marilyn Bowering’s tremendous monologue, Grandfather Was A Soldier—a contemporary woman’s Flanders Field mediation on death, sex, the internal and external holocausts that blight lives—whose surging symphonic structure is dictated and inspired by the quality of the writing.”
— Joyce McMillan, Glasgow Herald