Marilyn Bowering Book Launch

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Saturday, January 23rd, 2016
2:00 AM

Mary MacLeod, an exiled seventeenth-century Hebridean poetess was banned by the chiefs from composing any song indoors or outdoors; so she famously composed a song on her threshold. Marilyn Bowering, who taught at VIU in Nanaimo for many years, was drawn to the story of Mary MacLeod (Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh) during her many treks through Scotland. “I found a 1934 edition of her songs and connected with the Victoria Gaelic Choir so I could hear Gaelic sound.

The generous Sharron Gunn agreed to translate whatever I needed. I learned about the difficulties of fixing Màiri’s dates, and of various opinions about the basic outlines of her life; but that she’d liked snuff and whisky and had lived to a great age. Intriguingly, there was the puzzle of her exile by MacLeod chiefs she’d offended with her verses; I began to learn about the period in which she’d lived, of the marginalisation of Gaelic culture in general and her marginalisation in particular.

I learned of the instruction she’d given about the manner of her burial, and of its continuing controversy.” Bowering’s travel and research resulted in her new poetry book Threshold, a collaboration with her photographer-daughter Xan Shian. “For me it is about poetry; about being a woman poet in a changing culture when poetry, as in Màiri’s later years, is largely disregarded; about having a vocation for an art form for which there is small reward or place; and about being an older woman living with the problems of age which include grief, anger and physical fragility (and the need for some pain-killing whisky) and with its privileges, too, such as having learned trust in heart and intuition and to believe, despite the flow of contemporary events, that words retain the power to affirm human values and communicate wisdom across cultures and even time and space. That words may outlast a fall of darkness.” Marilyn Bowering returns to Nanaimo on Saturday January 23, 2016, to launch the book at the Vancouver Island Regional Library North at 2:00 p.m.

She has received many awards for her fiction, non-fiction and poetry, including designation of Notable Book by the New York Times, short-listing for the world-wide Orange Prize, the Gwen MacEwen Poetry prize, Pat Lowther Prize, the Dorothy Livesay Prize, several National Magazine Awards, nominations for the Governor General’s award, the Prix Italia and Sony Award. Her work has been translated into Spanish, Finnish, German and Greek and Punjabi. The long poem Threshold was co-winner of the Gwendolyn MacEwen Poetry Competition for Best Suite, 2013.