The Book Collector
By Tim Bowling AVAILABLE
0-88971-235-2
Nightwood Editions
5.25 x 7.5 · 80 pages
Paperback · $16.95
November 2008
“...hauntingly imagined and deftly crafted.”
—Canadian Literature
“The Book Collector is Edmonton-based poet Tim Bowling’s eighth collection. Add to that three novels, a collection of interviews edited by him, and the 2007 memoir The Lost Coast, and you’ve got one industrious writer. He is also one of the most gifted poets in the country.”
—Zachariah Wells, Quill & Quire
“The Book Collector is Tim Bowling's eighth volume of poetry. Two of his earlier collections were shortlisted for the Governor General's Award and last year he was the sole Canadian awarded a Guggenheim Fellowship – a sure sign that his work is well regarded outside the small pond of CanLit.
Bowling grew up outside Vancouver in Ladner, B.C. He now lives in Edmonton but, in an imaginative sense, he has never left his Fraser River roots behind. Again and again in his poetry, he harks back to childhood experiences and to time spent on the salmon fishing boats.
The salmon themselves, in their "explosive blood and silver," are potent metaphors. In the opening poem, the creatures seem relentlessly driven by fate: "their hard flanks ripple, / their dark eyes bore into the planet's flesh, / their jaws gape, streaming silt and seaweed."
The poet's fascination with the salmon is apt, for their life cycle is a natural tradition and Bowling is something of a traditionalist in poetic terms. His regard for the past comes through even in his imagery (in one poem, his brother's tan is "the shade of Roman breastplate bronze"). He also has a tremendous flair for figurative language, which occasionally tips into overdrive ("I went out to stare through the prison bars / of the heron's stance, dragging the rain-sky's / blood-drenched nobleman's cloak"). But he's never boring.
These are poems of strong feeling, but they're not a foghorn blast. Some of Bowling's most affecting work is elegiac and tinged with melancholy. In "Cineaste," he ruminates on the classic film The Seven Samurai: "youth's dreams go unrealized, you find your hair's grey, your parents are gone and you're all alone."
Elsewhere, Bowling writes with heartfelt directness: "I want what I can't keep from losing." It's his fierce, expressive claim on "the condemned surfaces of life" that gives The Book Collector its poignancy and its power.
Bowling uses his personal experience to refract the time-honoured themes of mortality and loss.”
—Barbara Carey, The Star, Feb 08, 2009
“The opening lines of Tim Bowling's The Book Collector tell us, "It's a new world" but, as the businessman sips his "green tea to display his globalism," we know where we're going—back to the familiar waters of Bowling's beloved Fraser River: "it begins, / another salmon run ... / Several million sockeye hang at the mouth, / a swarm at the entrance of the hive, / turning their hunger inland, all feeding done."
And the question becomes: is the salmon a metaphor for Bowling himself? Is his feeding done, his feeding off his past as a fisherman in the wilds of BC? Bowling, who recently won the prestigious Guggenheim, became Canada's bard only after years of writing poetry collections—and a work of non-fiction, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture—about his longing for this fading world. But you get the sense from this collection that the old salmon runs of his youth have spawned imagery Bowling cannot easily or willingly escape—he's trapped in a knitted loop that keeps hooking him back to the coast even as he lives the urbanite's life in land-locked Edmonton. His speaker's a husband and father who hangs out at rep cinemas which show The Seven Samurai and yet, in "Cineaste," the scene always cuts to the "Sound of salmon striking a net."
In "The Return," the salmon overtakes the speaker, torturing him as his wife and children look on: "I can't get out of bed this morning. / It isn't what you think ... / Simply, I'd become a tributary of the Fraser River / and the last wild salmon / had chosen my body in which to dig her redd." He seems on the verge of release or new maturity like the salmon of his seas.”
—Robin Durnford, Vue Weekly, Week of July 16, 2009, Issue #717
“...hauntingly imagined and deftly crafted.”
—Owen Percy, Canadian Literature
