The Sunday Before Winter: New and Selected Poetry

Sparling Mills was a freelance reviewer living in Herring Cove, N.S.

The Sunday Before Winter isdivided into four parts: the first three (75 pages) are the selected poems; the remaining part presents the new ones.

When I read the book straight through, I noticed that the selected poems are more detailed than the new ones. For example, the very first poem in the book, “Rose Harbour Whaling Station 1910,” tells of a man who went crazy after killing whales for six weeks “He wanted what a woman /couldn’t do — /to mend some sin in him” (lines 19-21). One night he declares, “I’m letting go,” and proceeds to cut his lover open, “a red seam.” As she dies, she sees his eyes are “miracles of peace.”

This exquisite horror is produced in another selected poem, “Said the Grace” (p.53). In these 17 lines, Bowering portrays a child who “loves animals” so much that she will “break break” a bird’s wing so it will fit “in a little box /under the tree swing.” Like the killer of whales in the aforementioned poem, the child feels religious ecstasy after administering physical pain.

The new poems in Part IV are more general, more philosophic. In many of them, the imagery is of sleep and dreaming. I can best illustrate this from the title poem (p.85):

There are few links in the life of the mind

between the dreamer and his island.

We are asleep, or awaken full of longing,

and so sleep and long

until life is a tract of absence (lines 6-10).

In “Some Heedless Gazelle” (p.97), Bowering continues this vagueness. She uses the hackneyed imagery of “light and darkness” being “in flux, /but evil outweighs, /and joy is a stranger” (lines 10-12). This theory of life seems to imply that someone is losing his grip! In consequence, the reader is very glad to come upon the luscious “Love Poem for Lin Fan”; I quote the first line: “No bud is so delicate as your tongue tip” (p. 113). It ends “My mind goes no further.” While writing poetry in the future, Marilyn Bowering would do well to remember that line, to concentrate more on detailed emotions rather than on generalized philosophy. Perhaps she should go back and analyze why her earlier poems are so good.