Alchemy of Happiness

In her new volume of verse, Bowering continues her rigorous, ambitious path and delivers poems that blend a variety of personalities, times, and places that add up to an overall substance she sees as happiness. Like an alchemist of old, she transmutes experiences, perceptions, and perspectives into something richer and rarer despite the passage of years and the loss and death they have brought. * The Alchemy of Happiness, shows the author to be masterfully at ease with the alchemy of language. Bowering pares her poems, using an economy of words to great success, "the hook is deep / my heart never so whole / as when lurching on a leash" (43). "Love is / a new dress / thigh-high boots" (42). The themes of death and love are prominent: "No vision is necessary, / death is a bridge: // mirror its spaciousness / in the dark wood" (22). But through the mirror, Bowering also sees her own role as communicator of stories: "You came into this world for one purpose, / and that was to learn / the story of all beings" (17). Prairie Fire