Tim Bowling was born in Vancouver and raised in the nearby town of Ladner. He is the award-winning author of a number of books, including the novel The Paperboy's Winter (Penguin, 2003) and The Witness Ghost (Nightwood, 2003), which was short-listed for the Governor General's Award for Poetry. He edited Where the Words Come From: Canadian Poets in Conversation (Nightwood, 2002). His most recent collection is The Memory Orchard (Brick Books, 2004), and Bowling appeared in The New Canon: An Anthology of Canadian Poetry, 2005. The following poems are reprinted by permission of the author.
Any letters for me, please put them
In the burnt-out jack-o'-lantern.
If you find a fallen leaf
from my tenth or thirtieth year
please hang it on the clothesline
with my grandmother's linen.
Please don't press your face
to the screen on the porch door;
the moth-hunger in the human eye
is more than I can bear.
Tomorrow, perhaps, I'll begin again
the terrifying heart of life and muscle,
scrape the ash from the lantern
and circle my eyes, reel in the damp
of memory on its rusty wheel,
and greet you as any other man.
But not tonight. Please,
If you would come to me at all,
come as the smoke of one fire
to another, or as the voice of the moon
to the body of the slackened river.
At daybreak
a gull walks between
the empty beer bottles
the teenagers arranged
like birthday candles
on your bulk,
then flies off,
a vivid flare.
But there's no rescue now.
The absence of god
is filled with the longing
for the presence of god.
Night after night,
the stars attend
your stench
as scholars attend
the turning of time
into history.
Whale jaw, jack spring spine, rock cod gill,
scallop under skin of my hand; these
are the bones I'm burying now. Tomcat skull,
sparrow wing, spaniel paw, full moon behind
my bluest gaze; I'm planting them all.
No animal returns to gnaw its gnawed limb
left in a trap; I've thirty years to dig
the deep six for, and hard shoulderblades
to gunnysack. Darling, carry the spade
for me, chant my years without you down;
I want the sunlight on a new foundation,
my old bricks in the wormsweet ground.
Cattle hock, heron claw, muskrat rib,
mast I hang my breathing from; I'll part
the grass and roll and die; I'll build
new castanets: here's a fresh gentility:
as the hummingbird twines its tiny nest
of spiderweb and moss, so I build
my hope and sleep from the marrow
of your kiss.
Ten years ago we worked together at Chapters, and here we are in 2007, both of us with first books published this year. Aside from feeling I'm getting on a bit, I remember a poem of yours where you talk about carrying around The Collected Works of Billy the Kid on your back as though "an extra muscle"; did it help inspire this collection about another historical figure?
Yes, I remember that old poem, too. And, yeah, you're right: Ondaatje's early work made a big impression on me back when I was a wide-eyed, and under-read undergraduate student. I'd never heard of an author re-shuffling or re-inventing history, and had never read a contemporary longpoem before. I'd also never seen an author approach historiography or history as...continue reading
Gleaned from his four previous collections and garnished with more than a dozen new poems, Todd Swift's 'Seaway' is both a 'greatest hits' collection for those who've already read this verbally athletic Canadian-born poet at length and a comprehensive introduction for those on the European side of the Atlantic who have had, so far, only the occasional chance to get a taste of his work at the jostling, competitive buffet known as English language poetry. As such, it is long overdue. Swift, after all, has been a tireless champion of a distinctively cosmopolitan, open-minded, post-modernist strand of contemporary writing for quite some time and his work as an editor and ferociously scrupulous blogger in Budapest, Paris and, latterly, London has all too frequently occluded his reputation as a poet with a singular ability to be simultaneously learned, playful and profound...continue reading