The Witness Ghost

The Witness GhostDescription The Witness Ghost is Tim Bowling's most unified collection of poems since his widely praised debut, Low Water Slack (Nightwood, 1995). Here, in an extended sequence of powerful elegies, he traces his feelings of loss, bewilderment and anger at the death of his father, a man who spent his working life as a salmon fisherman on British Columbia's majestic Fraser River. Borne back into a past of old wharves, boats, nets and ripening

Description

The Witness Ghost is Tim Bowling's most unified collection of poems since his widely praised debut, Low Water Slack (Nightwood, 1995). Here, in an extended sequence of powerful elegies, he traces his feelings of loss, bewilderment and anger at the death of his father, a man who spent his working life as a salmon fisherman on British Columbia's majestic Fraser River. Borne back into a past of old wharves, boats, nets and ripening blackberries, the poet enters into the lush west coast riverscape in an attempt to recapture Heck Bowling's lingering spirit in all the complex human tangles of sorrow, joy, weariness and reverence. In his characteristic style of direct emotional statement mixed with startling imagery and metaphor, Bowling has written one of the most intense and loving statements to fatherhood in Canadian poetry, while at the same time extending his rapt immersion in the west coast's mythic history and beauty.
Prize(s): Short-listed Governor General's Award for Poetry (2003) 
"The award-winning Tim Bowling's series of intense elegies for his fisherman father ache with loss and longing for a time and place as well as for the man. The poet conjures up the wet coast's verdant wild with concise, always musical craft while etching moving portraits of his father."
-Joseph Blake, Victoria Times-Colonist
–

"The Witness Ghost mourns in a frank, adult voice. . . . the writing gains hallucinogenic intensity from the concentrated focus of Bowling's observation and his astonishing ability to recover and reconstruct evanescent states of feeling. . . . All of this serves to enmesh the grieving and the memories within a net of particularity, so that landscape, weather and work anchor each poem."
-Harry Vandervlist, Alberta Views
–Alberta Views

"Bowling's style can be sublime...

"An example of Bowling's ability to create novel and arresting images is found in "The Carrying Place," in which the unexpected emotions released in mourning are compared to "an ant that, / dragging a crumb of bread, / carries the baker's pain." Bowling relates his personal grief to the environment in "Now It Is the World's Turn to Die," which contains a reference to "the trees unfleshing, the salmon /

"In this book, the author commemorates his father by expressing personal sentiments with discipline and intelligence."
-Ronald Charles Epstein, Canadian Book Review Annual
–Canadian Book Review Annual

"[Bowling's] series of elegiac poems on his father's death, The Witness Ghost, haunts me: it's exactly the kind of poetry I wish I had the energy and commitment and imagination to write, and had he written often thus, it had been vain to blame and useless to praise him. Good stuff, is what I'm saying. ... I'm teaching the book this fall."
-book addiction
–book addiction

Details

Nightwood Editions
ISBN: 9780889711914
Paperback / softback
5.25 in x 7.5 in - 80 pp
Publication Date: 17/03/2003
BISAC Subject(s): POE011000-POETRY / Canadian / General 
Thema Subject(s): DC-Poetry