Love As It Is

Shannon Hengen is an assistant professor of English at Laurentian
University and the author of Margaret Atwood’s Power: Mirrors,
Reflections and Images in Select Fiction and Poetry.

The simplicity of the title adequately describes the book’s contents,
poems about the deceptive simplicity of human love. Pellucid in language
and spare in imagery, but at times nicely complicated by intertextual
references, these poems seem at their strongest when reaching the limit
of the human ability to describe any of the various kinds of love.

As George Sand writes in a letter, quoted in the fourth and final
section of this book, “I have loved as an artist, as a woman, a
sister, a mother, a nun, a poet,” and the range of this poet’s own
experiences of love seems similarly wide. In this last section, in part
a study of Sand’s love for Chopin, the poet weaves her own narrative
among translated letters by Sand and Chopin, bringing the strands
together to give new perspectives on both the letters and the narrative.
(The Acknowledgments state that “‘George Sand’s Letter ...’
received the National Magazine Award for Poetry, silver,” an award
that seems fully earned.)

Generally, this book views its subject in retrospect, exchanging a tone
of passionate engagement for reasoned commentary. In the first section,
“Antiquities,” the 11 poems are mainly set in distant places and
times. The voice changes again in the next section, “The Mercers,”
concerning an ordinary woman’s life in a fishing village. The third
section, “Eight Poems for Margaret” July-August 1989,” is written
with more immediacy, detailing the illness and death of a friend.
Formally, Bowering moves from the lyric to the traditional cadences of
the madrigal, and to several pleasing intertextual weavings of her own
work with that of others, such as the Sand-Chopin letters noted above.

That this poet is capable of giving the reader new knowledge about the
oldest of themes, and of doing so in an uncluttered style, recommends
this book highly. One is left to wonder, however, what Bowering might
produce were she to move somewhat away from the reason and clarity that
may overprotect her personae.