Tim Bowling, The Book Collector

"It happens now.

As the businessman in the cafe declares
'It's a new world,' blowing on his green tea
to display his globalism, it begins,

another salmon run on the Fraser River." (p1)

These lines are the very first in Bowling's 2008 The Book Collector, a slim volume of poems that I'd been meaning for some time to get to. In my little personal pantheon of writers from British Columbia who get this place in ways that I wish I could consistently grasp BC (or indeed life itself), Tim Bowling is one of the most reliable, even if sometimes I have to work at the reading, and even if he has lived physically in Alberta--though metaphysically often in BC--since 2005.

When The Book Collector first appeared from Harbour Publishing, Bowling was on a phenomenal run: he was one of only two Canadians to receive a Guggenheim fellowship; he had won Alberta Literary Awards in both 2007 (for poetry) and 2008 (for nonfiction); two of his previous three collections had been shortlisted for the national Governor General's Award; and he'd been shortlisted for the nation's Writer's Trust Nonfiction Prize. As of 2024, he has been nominated for the Alberta Literary Awards at least nine times that I can see, winning several, in five different categories: poetry, fiction, memoir, book-length nonfiction (other than memoir), and short nonfiction.

This is a writer you need to know, in other words, if you don't already. Personally, I'm quick to confess that I distrust book awards generally, but in this case, I cite Bowling's nominations and awards function only as something of a guarantor that I'm not the only person to appreciate his work. If you don't trust awards lists, that's fine, but for me, Bowling's work is so consistently stunning that I've sometimes found myself complaining just because a piece doesn't do precisely what I want (a piece that you can often find another reader praising to the skies).

The page at Harbour Press for Bowling's collection The Witness Ghost quotes my own remark on that book, which was an uncredited quotation from Samuel Johnson, talking about Thomas Gray's "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard": had he written always thus, we both said, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise him. Neither Gray nor Bowling writes always thus, so to speak, but at his best, Tim Bowling just can't be touched.

It'll sound like hyperbole, but while reading "The Soccer Players," literally my breath was taken away, and I had to stop reading and lean back in my chair before resuming the poem. I'm not quoting it, because it's a poem that needs reading rather than sampling, but oh. Oh.

"Names" opens with the personable "I wanted to kiss Lianna Gould more / than I'd ever wanted to do anything" (p37), and while it moves on to reflect on aging and on surviving the deaths of parents, there's a real sense of humour. At its core, "Names" insists on both the power and the irrelevance of nostalgia, and I found it just so satisfying.

And "The Return," Bowling imagining himself a salmon, surreally, perhaps recalling a fever-dream during an illness: "all I owned was what the wild gave me / at the end, my death in my own place / and the wake of glaciers to bear it to the sea" (p29).

And "I Could Never Stay Awake," Bowling moving or caught between sleep and death, childhood and fatherhood, a child's birth and a father's death.

And "A Time of Inconsequent Change," which opens with a rueful, self-deprecating, perhaps not inaccurate summary for much of Bowling's work: "A time of inconsequent change / in a forgotten town, though the salmon / remembered the taste of the river" (p13).

And don't get me started on "The Human Condition" ("why are the stars and our love not enough?" [p32]), which might be bitter but kind of broke my heart.

Not everything in The Book Collector works for me, but not everything needs to. That's not how poetry collections work, and if you're wanting uniformity, go read a long poem instead. These above are some of the poems that leapt off the page at me, poems that I've found myself continuing to think about over the last few weeks since first finishing the book.

You want to know BC? There aren't many writers who can give you the version of BC that's available to and through Tim Bowling, and the number who can do that in poetry is vanishingly small.

Honestly, just go read Tim Bowling, even if it's not The Book Collector.

More Bowling commentary here at Book Addiction HQ:

• The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird (2023, essays: "Unwired and unrepentant, I sit in my biological frame and write in longhand the stories and poems that I hope will transcend the limitations of my private self...")
• The Marvels of Youth (2023, a novel: "A man has a heart, and if he has lived in places he loves and among people he loves or finds intriguing, then nostalgia's not a pejorative word that substitutes for mawkish or unrealistic")
• Circa Nineteen Hundred and Grief (2014, poetry: "This is for men and women / of certain years who, / having left prints on the sand, / remember the feeling / of castles in their fingers")
• The Witness Ghost (2003, poetry: "I smear the mosquito on my palm / to wear your blood, the endless cedar / smutch of the possible. But hope is bad science. / A mosquito lives a few hours / and you've been dead a year.")
• The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory, and the Death of Wild Culture (2007, memoir: "My grandfather's boyhood spent delivering jars of honey to customers connects directly to my childhood of carrying jack springs up Georgia Street to Grandma Atkey.")