An elegant surrealist progression of the post-modern, a broken internal monologue that blooms into a New Age event,
Hotels by George Bowering and above/ground press. George Bowering (poet, novelist, historian, biographer, teacher)
is one of the founders of TISH poetry journal. He is the first Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate. He has high honours
for his work, including The Order of Canada and The Order of British Columbia. Bowering has published 5 Chapbooks with
above/ground press amongst other Chapbooks, seven collections of critical essays, five memoirs, three books of historical
nonfiction, and six plays.
A broken interior monologue that spins, spinning into the night, the time of writers’ haunts. This work was inspired by
Hotel Victoria by Artie Gold, and a posthumous book by Gold, Romantic Words Bowering is editing,
Hotels being a response Chapbook.
On the surface, a travelogue written in a series of hotel rooms, San Francisco, Frankfurt, B.C., New York, Verona, Peurto Limon,
Calgary, Lund, Guatemala, Chinatown . . . a description, walls that don’t meet the ceiling, walls, locks, “a little loop, that
slipped over a nail”, windows that we don’t look out of. As if something/someone escapes us, the name, the dress, the year of time,
exists on the periphery of the highway but is not there. Perhaps a desert, perhaps a game of lost and found, perhaps the last verse
of The Waste Land (T.S. Eliot), this work spins DaDa, spins time. Esoteric, mystic, as if a burning blunt of sage, the smoke
drifts up to the sky. The mention of a girl, a night, a dream, the lost song of Summer.
“This strange
author thinks he is at sea with dead sailors,
trying to stand before a wooden magdalene,
tears all over his face and shirt.”
Hard spaces of third world countries, exile, outside, for what slips through your hands, for the pen and paper, for what stays in
your hands, the hard spaces rounded.
Mysterious and surrealist, a fantastique poetic event in New Age literature, Hotels by George Bowering.
Available @ above/ground press.
