With Selected Poems, Tim Bowling has gathered together his finest
poems over a twenty-year period, a selection including work from his
widely celebrated debut collection, Low Water Slack, in 1995, to his
tenth collection, Tenderman, in 2011. Always a poet of intense emotion
and surprising metaphor whose lyric-narrative voice ranges in tone from
romantic to humorous to coldly tragic and unrelievedly dark, Bowling's
integrity has never wavered, nor has his commitment to celebrating
poetic tradition and the land and waterscapes of his cherished West
Coast.
Selected Poems is unabashedly musical, image-rich and ambitious; poems
of the natural world, childhood, family, death, and the pleasures and
rigours of art lead into ever-deeper explorations of history, society
and middle age, but the faith in the power of language to convey
something essential about life remains consistent. This is a book whose
pages are viscerally alive with concrete, physical sensations; you can
hear the seagulls, smell the wet cedar and brine, and see the sun sink
on the great salmon runs with the clunk of a cue ball. Bowling's
particular ability to make his place come alive and to transfer that
vitality into a variety of other subjects, from book collecting to
beekeeping, has been celebrated throughout his career.
Many of the poems gathered here have won significant honours, both in
and outside Canada, from the Canada Council for the Arts, the Alberta
Foundation for the Arts, the Bridport Prize Foundation in England, and
the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation in the United States. His
Selected Poems is a landmark publication in Canadian literature.
