Delayed Mercy and Other Poems

A. Vasius was an editor and poet in Toronto.

George Bowering’s latest collection of poetry is a thick book on weighty ideas. Delayed Mercy, subtitled “late night poems,” are single page poems addressed to other writers. The writers, both living and dead, include an unusual mix from Atwood to Zukovsky, though the women included are a glaring minority. Whether Bowering does not admire or acknowledge very many women writers, or simply prefers to roll up his sleeves and swagger with the boys, remains unanswered. The little name tags on the poems (fr Tom Raworth, fr Ed Saunders, fr Amiri Baraka, etc.) reflect Bowering’s appreciation of other writers, rather than shed any light on the writing.

Delayed Mercy is associative writing at its most curious kind.

Cuban volunteers

cut cane & we dont even

dream about them. Planes take off

on time, our shoes find each other

in the dark. Bodies dont.

Sound association, word association and idea association hold those lines together. The poems are fashioned by chance and necessity; Bowering works at his randomness. He constructs a kind of code with the repetition of certain words like cat, pronoun, and boy. These words are not to be taken at face value, for example “Boy” really means “poem.” “We always/say ‘the poem’ in quotation marks,/ ... ‘The boy’/would do as well.” This device might be interesting enough on the first run through, but it quickly wears thin. The codifying begs the question: why not just say it? Obscurantism holds the interest only of academics.

Repeated images and phrases give the volume its cohesion. They move in and around the poems like goldfish swimming in a bowl: quiet, contained and bug-eyed. Bowering writes an abundance of quotable lines:

A ruler is a stick

with an unpleasant personality,

just past its end is death, & till then

He mimics Barry Goldwater’s famous self-damning words: “Zeal in the defense against liberty,” and lets Alexander Pope down ever so gently: “a poem should be abandoned,/ mercifully.”

Delayed Mercy isa strong collection of poems from a writer working at his prime abilities and sensibilities, yet I wish Coach House had taken more care in producing the volume. I counted at least seven flagrant typographical errors in my non-editing capacity.