In The Capital City of Autumn
The poetry collection, “In the Capital City of Autumn,” by Canadian writer Tim Bowling traces a chronology of age and evokes a nostalgia of childhood with the testament of domestic residue of life and the newness of meaning through expertly positioned language. He takes the reader to a house with a “thickened shell,” tilts our heads up to a starry sky “like baby teeth in a grave,” and I will never look at a Dandelion the same way again with its “floating sperm.” He is right. Bowling folds in the reality of life with clean lyricism, “as two diseased lungs of the moon/ breached without height to gasp/ on sandbars sharp as human bone.” We can navigate these poems and come out on the other side with acknowledgment that the pain of life is the grit that polishes the Pearl. And, above else, “something new begins to walk across the broken glass.”
The collection is organized into three parts with a body of poetry titled the “Great Gatsby Poems” in Part Two. I found that he made the ordinary new for me and tucked me into a sense of home that left a comforting nook of reading- I think many of us remember those childhood homes that extend into us, their memorized surfaces and how we shaped them, how they shaped us and kept us connected to others.
This is my first-time encountering Tim Bowling and I was astounded in discovering the body of work he has crafted throughout the years. He is the author of twenty-four works of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. He is an award-winning author earning two Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Awards, five Alberta Book Awards, a Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, two Writers’ Trust of Canada nominations, two Governor General’s Award nominations and a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of his entire body of work. To preview the body of his work please visit: https://49thshelf.com/Contributors/B/Bowling-Tim. In pursuing getting to know more of Tim Bowling’s works, I find “The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird: Essays on the Common and Extraordinary” (2022) and “Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation” (2022) are two places to start that speak to me. Bowling has reached me in a place of the love of writing and Canadian literature.
I find the Gatsby Poems interesting and I am keeping them for a day when I teach Gatsby in an English class. I would love to witness the connections that students make between these poems and the novel. Bowling gives voice and carries on character arcs for secondary characters of the novel. Writing throughout the 90s and onwards, Bowling brings a solid perspective to literature and the Canadian writing community. Propelled by Fitzgerald, Bowling identified in an interview with Hollay Ghadery as a part of the CanL(It) Crowd that Fitzgerald “died feeling like a failure,” further that “we write the books we cannot find to read.” Bowling thus has written about the life surrounding the Fraser River and a sense of duty to the memories of his childhood. I am sure the CanLit community is grateful for this sense of duty.
Thank you to Tim Bowling, Buckrider Books, Wolsak and Wynn Publishers and River Street Writing for the complimentary copy in exchange for an honest review!
