What About Tim Bowling?:

Zach: Tim Bowling's a prolific poet, and as with most prolific poets, has published his fair share of work that should've been left in a drawer. But when he's on his game, there are few poets writing in Canada who can touch him. His last collection, The Witness Ghost, was shortlisted for the GG last year and was, in my opinion, the best book on that list. I was a bit concerned that The Memory Orchard, so close on the heels of his last, would be a weaker collection. But it isn't. It might even be better. To be sure, there are weak poems in the collection and Bowling's usual themes (memory, grief, love, the physical and spiritual cycles of death and rebirth) and the all-stops-pulled full-throttle method he has of writing about them, flirt constantly with sentimentality and excessive poeticism. But this is one of the things, as with Ted Hughes, as with Pablo Neruda, that make him a major poet, or at least a major poet in the making (Bowling is still only 40 years old): his writing takes enormous artistic risks, as a result of which the poems that don't fail aren't merely workshop competent, but are incredibly stirring. Quoting Melville in "Classic," he writes "A mighty book . . . / depends upon a mighty theme." Bowling's is a poetry whose ambition is uncommon and this book has some devastatingly good poems in it. I'd like to quote one in full here:

Does the World Remember Us?

Sated with garbage and guts
the gulls on the roof-peak
saw me lick the scent of black-
berry from her bronzing shoulder
and gawked as, storm-browed,
I pelted stray cats with rocks.
When weren't they there,
those brine-eyed judges
in their robes of ash, turning
into the wind to watch me puke
my first cheap bottle, stretching
their necks toward the time
I helped the mind-blank
and shivering old neighbour home.

And how many pitiable bullheads
gaped in terror at my blue intention
to destroy, or dew-fleshed salmon
saw my hand-tombs scrape across
their vision of the infinite and clear?

It must be coded in the species now,
so that this very moment's
gulls and fish must sometimes snap
awake to flashes of remoter terror
so real they seem less like the present
than the past the long dead
of their own kind lived
(where even acts of gentleness
fade in the quick of killing).

Memory keeps the suffering vigilant.

From the rooftops, the deep tides,
out of ditchbanks, cloud-currents,
telephone wires, prickle bushes,
beyond compost piles, shed-shadows,
wharf-shadows, grass-shadows—
this flinch from the imprint of power.

Senses wide, I remember
the world's gallied look
and a weeping so quiet
those years couldn't hear it
for the sound of moths
shaking the dark off their wings.

There is so much about this poem, as with a good many others in this book, that I love and that impresses me. One thing about Bowling's versification that I'm drawn to is its atavistic Anglo-Saxon qualities. Just look at the diction, its lack of Latinate influences, and the patterns of alliteration, assonance and consonance he builds, the hard g's of the first couple of lines, and the repeated hard k sounds that follow in that verse paragraph. And the compounds he employs, akin to kennings: storm-browed, brine-eyed, mind-blank, dew-flesh, hand-tombs, ditchbanks, cloud-currents, shed-shadows, wharf-shadows, grass-shadows. This is a poet (much like his fellow British Columbian, Peter Trower, whose new book of Selected Poems would have done this shortlist proud) at home in the word-horde, who knows how to name, whose "senses [are] wide." And what a gorgeous synaesthetic image to close.

Bowling's verse is almost always crisp and crackly, it has the energy whose want Alex laments in Borson's book. And though it's mostly pretty serious elegiac stuff, he has a bit of fun from time to time as well, as in "Trainyards," a beautiful love poem in which the speaker pities the train engines "the loss of [his wife's] warm passage" after she leaves her "apartment / at the edge of the trainyards" to live with him:

So sullenly they rest there, tortured
by the distant sparking of our bodies
through the hushed, mid-winter nights.

Steven: I agree with you that Tim Bowling's book takes some risks, but I can't agree that they work. There's this overall feel of something false about it. For a book called The Memory Orchard (not the most scintillating title) I would expect the role of memory to be as true as possible. But look at a poem like "Grade One" where the teacher's perfume and the smell of "glue and apple core" mix in his memory, and what she was writing on the blackboard becomes a "slow smoulder off her skin." Written from the direct, in-the-moment point of view, it seems way off for a six year old to think that way. 

It's typical of Bowling's overwritten style in this book. Lines like "dreaming of a boys' choir rinsing the air / with octaves" and "clutching our cold pence for the plate" and "as if for cygnets and recited psalms" are so much in love with words that they seem to escape his control. He can take a potent image, like the beached whale in "Dead Whale on the Ferry Crossing" with its opening "Your only mourners are the stars. / They arrive slowly, stay all night." and work it into complete non-meaning:

Night after night, 
the stars attend 
your stench
as scholars attend 
the turning of time 
into history. 

It's an unconvincing simile. After all, the stars are indifferent, and if anything Bowling could use a bit of indifference in a world "absent of God." What, besides the curious sounds of "He lies / in the matrix of his disappearing name," does something like that mean? 

I'm not saying there's anything deliberately fake about these poems. But they seem to move less through an 'orchard' and more like a walk through a strenuous battle scene, or one of those wild romantic storms we hear so much of. For all his word-horde approach, Bowling still manages to blunt the point with his constant use of the definite article: 

In the middle of a city, 
a roadside church, 
the nearby traffic-light on red. Suddenly 
the bells begin to chime.
I am called to the medieval sphere 
the Great Chain of Being 
the Sioux circle, the Great Spirit, 
the million perfect moons 
on the body of the salmon 

and so on, each "the" nailing down the image and feel instead of letting it sail off into the magic light he seems to want to create. 

The worst offence is his maddening oracular voice. It undermines rather than fulfills the promise of that round full Anglo-Saxon tone. Take the poem "Widow." Here he addresses the subject in such condescending lines as "Child of poverty, my dear remainder" and "Little lost one, Depression waif." It's a shame, because this poem contains one of the strongest images and themes in the book. 

o city girl, what did you feel
when you missed your stop 
and the trolley reached the end 
of the line, and the driver was gone,
 the windows smashed, and the chill
wind off an ocean you never imagined 
tore the brotherly kiss of the Scottish pilot
from your cheek and the ticket from
your hand, and you stepped off
in bridal white . . .  

. . . etc. etc., the theme laid clear and bare; but any empathy and passion is held at bay by declaiming "o city girl". 

The difference between the writing of a Ted Hughes and a Tim Bowling is the difference between control and enthusiasm, between identification with the subject and standing up in front of the subject. If you're going for a comparison between Hughes and Bowling, I'd point out that while The Memory Orchard is a bombastic guided tour through the overgrown trees, Crow sits quietly in the branches, talons and beak red with real blood.

Alex: I think I come down somewhere in-between. That "Trainyards" poem stuck in my head too (and isn't that one of the tests?).

Like Steve, I found some of it overwritten. Take the beginning of the opening poem "The Call":

In the high windstorms of the coast
the power is always going out
like the voice of God in our time.
Children are sent for candles
or if there are no children
the grown search in drawers alone.
Now the rain down the windowpanes
and the wax down the candles
and the tears down the face
make their almost-silent trinity.

Dragging in the fading "voice of God in our time" makes me think I'm reading Matthew Arnold long after the fact. And don't even start with that painful "trinity" analogy.

And yet he gets away with it. In this passage, like many others, because it works as poetry first. You can hear it when you read it aloud, in the measure of the lines, the repetition and the internal rhymes. Plus, even though he can be "bombastic", "oracular" and even clichéd, I at least follow what he's saying most of the time.

I wouldn't worry about comparisons between Bowling and Hughes. We only have to compare him to Borson (so far). There are some similarities. This is another very personal book of short lyric poems working up the field of memory. It lays itself open to some of the same charges of preciosity, opacity, and self-absorption that we fired at Borson. Sadly, I think a lot of this is just the state of the art of poetry today.

I rank this book higher than Borson's for its moments of grace, feel for the language, ability to conjure a mood, confident and energetic voice, and greater clarity. I didn't find it as baffling as Steve ("matrix of his disappearing name" is OK by me), though I agree it has turgid, overblown moments that seem like pure filler (e.g., "The absence of god / is filled with the longing / for the presence of god"). I don't think a mighty book needs mighty themes all the time. Some poems, like the one about getting shaved ("How to Live the Examined Life") are small delights.

Zach: I'm glad you mentioned that poem, Alex, because when Bowling writes "to shine three days a week / (a decent record for any man)", it's hard not to see it as a sort of wry commentary on his own work, or at least on the art of poetry in general, in which complete success is so very rare. Certainly, The Memory Orchard has glaring flaws, but like you say, he achieves two things that to me are litmus tests of poetry: 1) He gets away with things that should not work (because verging on sentimental, bombastic, clichéd), with surprising frequency. 2) His rhythms, imagery and metaphors, when they do work, have a way of glomming on to the brainpan. Borson has the same flaws, perhaps even in lesser measure, but I found nothing very memorable there.

As for "the state of the art of poetry today," I think it's always been so, at least if we're to believe the accounts of Juvenal and Horace and Pope. There might be more bad poetry now in toto, but per capita, I doubt it. At any rate, an argument for another day . . . 

Alex: Bad poetry has always been with us. What I meant was a particular kind of poetry (not necessarily all bad) being the "state of the art." As Philip Marchand remarked nearly ten years ago when reviewing the Breathing Fire anthology, "If there is a single lesson conveyed by the poems [in this anthology], it may be that it is time to end the dominance of anecdotal free-verse lyrics. For one things, they're all beginning to sound alike." I think this is still an issue.

Steven: Tim Bowling does have the virtue of not "sounding alike." He can create acid-etched and calibrated poems like "Owl Pellet" - 

This is the only letter God will ever send you.
And if, opening it, you expect answers,
advice, condolences, you will find
a signature of bone. Otherwise,
a great hunched watchfulness
will leave your body, and perch
on the black branch between stars.

 - and then stomp all over it with things like

Ten years since the slime of the living salmon
unctioned my hands. Starlight,
when last did I feel you? Blue heron,
how long since my eyesight frayed
at your wings' soaked coronas? 

In the poem "Ladders" he says that he "fished the way Frost farmed, / half-assed, and for the myth / the poems require." If I disagree about the success of the risks he takes with the language, it's because he seems too often, to my ear, to let some grand bardic voice get in the way of the 'myth.' Wisdom and the quick-witted escape are associated with the Celtic salmon image that he uses throughout the book. I just wanted more of the wit of the myth on its own, and less of the strained voice of "wisdom."

Still, I'd go along with putting The Memory Orchard in the higher rank, so far.

NEXT: Where's David Manicom?