Average Reviews:
(More customer reviews)I bought this book with high hopes after reading Bowling's stellar "The Thin Smoke of the Heart," a book filled with tight powerful poems, and was sorely disappointed. This felt like the early draft manuscript of a book, or a collection of outtakes from Thin Smoke. It is structurally flaccid, overburdened with pop philosophizing, and contains a shocking number of truly bad lines. Perhaps Bowling was trying to take his poetry in a new direction. He should retrace his steps.
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In his fourth collection of poetry, Tim Bowling continues his exploration of loss, heartache, joy and wonder. Employing a supple lyricism that is at turns tender and fierce, he draws on his experiences as a father and son, on his memories of childhood, and on his journeys into landscape as ways to explore the deep mysteries at the heart of consciousness. Darkness and Silence moves from the lush riverscape of BC's south coast to the eerie moonscape of the Alberta badlands, from elegiac considerations of the lives of other writers (such as Al Purdy in "Elegy for an Elegist" and Willa Cather in "I Went into the Gardens of the Empress Hotel"), to the imagistic meditations on the simple acts of washing dishes, going for a walk, or returning home after a day's work. These highly crafted poems, rich with startling metaphors and vivid images, underline Robert Frost's idea that poetry is, above all else, a performance. Bowling believes wholeheartedly in emotion and drama, and he puts his deep love and respect for the sounds and rhythms of English into every line he writes. Intellectual without being academic, and philosophical without being abstract, he is a poet fully engaged with the challenges, beauties and hard truths of day-to-day living.
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