Frayed Linens

Marilyn Bowering casts the poet as a traveller, and Frayed Linens is a poet’s exorcism of the nightmares that haunt today’s world. She writes of beauty and resilience within darkness, from the ruins of Greece to the horrors of Mariupol, showing how History echoes itself at every turn. She is accompanied in these poems by ancestral and mythic figures, beloved poets, and the ghosts of her own life-story as the body and spirit – the frayed linens of the title – are worn and renewed over time. From a mother’s sorcery, to a satyrical abduction, to a Celtic saint’s interventions, and the stone hands of a gargoyle, the range and energy of Bowering’s new collection cannot conceal the tenderness that propels it. These are poems of witness, empathy, and compassion, clear-eyed in their confrontation of failure and in the capacity of friendship, love, and will to retain redemptive power.

Cover and interior photographs by Xan Shian.

Marilyn Bowering is an award-winning poet and author. Her prize nominations and awards include the David and Ruth Lampe and Gwen MacEwen Poetry prizes, the Pat Lowther Prize, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, several National Magazine Awards, the Malahat Review Long Poem Prize, two short-listings for the Governor General’s award, and shortlisting for the Prix Italia and the Sony Award. She was born in Winnipeg and grew up in Victoria, BC. She has lived in various parts of Canada and in Greece, Scotland, and Spain, and now makes her home on Vancouver Island.