Frayed Linens

Marilyn Bowering casts the poet as a traveler, 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.