Canadian Writers Abroad

Review of Marilyn Bowering’s
More Richly in Earth: A Poet’s Search for Mary MacLeod. McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2024;
The Unfinished World. Linda Leith Publishing, 2025.

Reviewed by Patricia Bradbury.

Marilyn Bowering, a highly acclaimed poet and novelist, who spent time away from British Columbia in Spain, Greece and Scotland, has recently published two remarkable books: More Richly in Earth: a poet’s search for Mary MacLeod, a biography and memoir, and The Unfinished World, a novel.

Both works are melodious but disruptive. They startle the reader in similar ways with sudden connections to parallel worlds. In the Scotland biography, More Richly in Earth, she jumps to her childhood in Sooke, BC in the early 1950s. In the British Columbia novel, The Unfinished World, she takes us to Theano and her husband Pythagoras during a tsunami in the middle of the fifth century BCE. Dissolving voices and leaps in time mean nothing (and everything) to her.

In More Richly in Earth, as the long title tells us, she searches for Mary Macleod, who “has been in plain sight but little seen,” a fascinating but elusive Gaelic poet from Skye and a contemporary of Milton and Shakespeare. Her dates are uncertain, but she probably died in 1707 at the age of 92. 

Bowering takes us through the glorious islands of Scotland as she wrestles academically, linguistically, and poetically with the contrary facts about gutsy Mary, the still cherished poet who was in and out of favour with various chieftains (in part for her so-called oversteps in verse). She was a victim of the English statutes of Iona (outlawing Gaelic bards) and an outcast banished for years to Scarba (an island not far from Mull). 

After her death, MacLeod’s Gaelic verses were recited for generations until eventually written down and saved, but the stories of her life have been twisted or lost. 

What Bowering discovers trying to find the true poet is a rough and tumble Mary, born of low economic status but high caste. Unmarried, sometimes cheeky, she danced on Dunvegan’s wide floorboards when young and was offered a pardon from banishment in middle age if she stopped making poetry.

She accepted this agreement and returned home to Skye, but soon took to voicing new verse in her doorway, a liminal space. Famously, she called this “song making on the threshold”. 

Purportedly a lover of whisky and snuff, she asked to be buried, face down in the ground, a witch’s burial. But why? 

Bowering tries to find out.

Alongside this search for MacLeod, or because of it, Bowering turns to her own early childhood in Sooke. Unannounced through the memoir are short poetic gems set in Canada with her caring grandmother, long forgotten and now explored. We wonder who Bowering is trying to find: Mary or herself. 

Indeed, she writes that searching for Mary “uncovered, like a seam of gold in my own foundations, a grandmother, and others whose gifts to me I had neglected; and it has restored my love of poetry.”

In her most recent novel, The Unfinished World, another grandmother, Nora, appears, but she too is almost unknowable like Mary, and she too guides the main character, in this case her desperate but environmentally committed granddaughter Pearl, toward the vastness of life and the value of memory and action. 

A lawyer dedicated to helping refugees, Nora has raised Pearl single handedly, telling extraordinary tales based on primitive stick dolls which she gives the child every birthday. Nearing death, Nora asks grown-up Pearl to write each story down from memory while looking at the dolls. 

Each of the tales interspersed through Pearl’s present-day journey is so vast and wondrous, we marvel at the power of Nora, the original teller, and also at the writing skills of Pearl, the recorder. Through suspension of disbelief, magic comes, and we are swept into language so beautiful it makes you fall into a dream. Here’s a description from one of the stories set in Spain in 950 BCE.

“If you can find the beginning, it will be inside a cave across a mineral-dusted floor from a small blue pond. At night, moonlight or starlight glides down a shaft of laddered rock and makes the water shine.” 

Later she calls the sea “a  polished flexible sheet of marbled stone.”

Pearl, a water lover with unexplained magical powers over fish, saved refugees in boats along the coast with Nora, and now travels in her grandmother’s footsteps, over land, finding small dolls Nora has planted along the way, like bread crumbs. She is seeking a new way of living using Nora as her compass. 

Working on a fish farm (where a cry on behalf of wild salmon becomes fervent) and helping refugees, she starts to solve the wreckage of her own life and create a tale of her own.

Like Italo Calvino, Marilyn Bowering is a shape-shifter, a shadow chaser, a daring  raconteur. Fearlessly, she sweeps us to a dance group in Jerusalem in 950 BCE then follows a young troubadour in Almeria, Spain, on a battlefield in 1147. The most outrageous incidents, she says, are the true ones. Strength and magic come by living these dissolving tales again.

Pearl’s journey in Canada and Mary’s life in Scotland prove this to be so. 

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“I was keeping notes, writing, working on a project for the Canada Council and reviewing for journals, newspapers and magazines – and yes, looking for a cheap place to live. I was happy after months in a van, to settle into a basic ‘villa’ (no electricity or water) on a cove half an hour outside of Parikia. The Aegean School of Fine Arts (now the Aegean Centre) then associated with Antioch College in the US, was a hub for young writers, photographers and painters. What I learned there and on travels throughout Greece, appears and reappears in my work. As with other places I have lived, I learned “through my feet” by being there, walking the ground and participating in daily life.”
— Marilyn Bowering, e-mail 10 February 2026.

Other places Marilyn Bowering has lived include Scotland, from 1977 onwards, first with Michael in Perthshire, then again in the 1980s and mid-90s.
“I quickly made contact with other writers and with publishers by submitting to and publishing in magazines. I also took on editorial work. More Richly in Earth tells a little of this time when I fell in love with the extraordinary landscape and the culture of the Highlands. We returned to Canada in 1979 but were in Edinburgh by the early 1980s where I found work as a freelance editor and in writing commissioned work for BBC Scotland.”
There were two years in Spain: “Living in Seville in the 1990s meant learning another language, but there were invitations to international conferences and events in Spain. For instance, I participated in the first feminist conference at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid! As well, I continued to write reviews for Canadian newspapers and journals… Living within commuting distance to the UK meant I could take advantage of opportunities there, as well. Several times I taught for the Scottish Writing Centre (Moniack Mhor), which was originally part of the Arvon Centres complex.” Bowering is also the librettist for Marilyn Forever (Gavin Bryars).
Bowering’s first novel, To All Appearances A Lady (Random House, 1989), was a New York Times Notable Book; her second, Visible Worlds (Harper Collins, 1997), was awarded the Ethel Wilson Fiction Prize. There followed Cat’s Pilgrimage (Harper Collins, 2003), and What It Takes to be Human (Penguin, 2006). Bowering has published many collections of poetry, including Threshold (Leaf Press, 2015), which includes “an encounter with the seventeenth-century Hebridean bard Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh (Mary MacLeod) and photographs by Xan Shian. Her most recent collection, Frayed Linens (Exile Editions, 2025) touches on travel, Greece, Mariupol, and a mother’s sorcery.

Patricia Bradbury now divides her year between Canada and Portugal. She spent two years in Scotland and a year in China. Her background is book reviewing, journalism, fiction writing, radio drama and professional communication. Her five-part play about Elizabeth Smart won an ACTRA award. She taught internationally trained journalists at Sheridan College and recently won an excellence in teaching award for her work with newcomers.

Further

• Marilyn Bowering
• “Passport: Marilyn Bowering – It was the first time I’d seen trees cased in ice,” Diana Pepper talks with Marilyn Bowering, about her early days of travel, The Independent, 13 September 1998, on the publication of Visible Worlds.
• “Marilyn Bowering’s Writing Space,” TNQ, Issue 149, April 2019.
• Bowering wrote the script for this NFB short animation, Divine Fate.
• Barbara Carey reviews Soul Mouth in the Toronto Star, 18 January 2013.
• Universidad Complutense de Madrid

Header photo: Marilyn Bowering, on the Island of Scarba above Correyvrechan in the Hebrides; photo: Michael Elcock.