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A Bright Forgetting is part of Bowman's journey of care for her parents and of remembering them and her family. It is an exploration of how to say goodbye. It is an elegy for what her parents and grandparents built, and what was rent, torn, or is tearing. This family fragmentation simply reveals how as humans, all our lives are synapses firing bright with beauty and memories- a bird takes flight, a child leaves, a boy finds a girl, a home; a family grows, thrives, travels, divides, misunderstands, then age and death unfurl a final banner- the panoply of hope, longing, and forgetting. The poems use family history, cherished travel memories, close description of family members and relationships to investigate what it means to be a family, and to discover more about oneself in the process.
It's about the poignancy of transience; including the Spanish Surrealists yet using the deep image and leaping image, the poet holds fast to the memories, reflections, and dreams of that bright firefly flash of life. These types of imagery were used by, among others, the poet Robert Bly. He looked to and translated many world poets, including the Spanish Surrealists, mostly unknown to Americans in the 1950's. This approach to poetry, enables Bowman to tap the inner places of the heart even in the vastness of American landscapes like the Grand Canyon or in the small high crags of a mountain or her grandmother's farm.
