Readers are generally well advised to keep away from books whose titles contain the words best or greatest in conjunction with poems or poetry. Changing on the Fly: The Best Lyric Poems of George Bowering is a joyous exception. Canada's first authorized poet laureate started out 50 years ago writing lyric poetry: short personal or descriptive poems employing only one voice or point of view (usually the author's own). He still returns to the form from time to time (though the most recent examples here are dozen years old), despite his having been at war with his lyric self since the 1960s.

In many cultures--Chinese, for example--the lyric is inalterably the basic unit of poetry. In English-speaking countries, though, many poets at work in the lingering shadow of modernism aspire to write longer and more complex poems, weaving two or more melody lines to make a composition instead of a mere tune. Bowering is one of the key figures in this struggle. Until now he has renounced his own lyric poetry while denouncing other people's. This has obscured one part of his talent and also the fact that sometimes the lyric is the perfect engine for expressing certain thoughts, observations, epiphanies.

Here's a tiny and near-perfect illustration from this collection, written while Bowering was living in Montreal three decades ago. "In the blue lamplight/the leaf falls/on its shadow". The next one is subtler and a bit mysterious: "The leaves/dropping on the sidewalk./I thought/they were footsteps/ behind me". Inevitably some of the poems exhibit the sense of place I think of as Vancouverosity: "The great local poem begins/when someone pulls/out the last spike./We declare the hole that is left/the centre of everything".

This rewarding collection is rich in such examples of precision, many of them actually more shortish than short and made up of numbered sections. In this and others ways we can see Bowering, beginning in the 1970s, letting go and moving on, as the poems become prosier and more language-centred, without ever entirely abandoning his original claim to lyric excellence. His foreword, one of the most cogent of its type, is a brief, eloquent, and playful introduction.