Tim Bowling is the author of twenty-four works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. He is the recipient of numerous honours, including two Edmonton Artists’ Trust Fund Awards, five Alberta Book Awards, a Queen Elizabeth II Platinum Jubilee Medal, two Writers’ Trust of Canada nominations, two Governor General’s Award nominations and a Guggenheim Fellowship in recognition of his entire body of work.
We are joined by this phenomenally accomplished and internationally-acclaimed CanLit icon for our Power Q & A series, to ask a quick question about his latest book, a collection of poems, In the Capital City of Autumn (published by Wolsak & Wynn, 2024).
Tim is in top form in this collection. Threading through autumnal themes such as the loss of his mother and the demolition of his childhood home, his children growing and the inevitable passage of time, Bowling writes with rich lyricism and imagery. Sweet William and loosely woven woollen mitts for his mother, the moon as “an egg in the pocket of a running thief” for time, salmon for eternity. In the Capital City of Autumn, the characters of The Great Gatsby come to life, and three a.m. brings wisdom. These are masterful poems, lightened with a touch of whimsy, poems to sink into on a quiet evening.
Welcome, Tim!
Q: The title of your collection is an arresting throughline for this collection. Would you tell us how you came up with it?
A: I have always been more of a poet of autumn than of spring (are there poets of summer and winter? I guess there must be!). And as I've grown older, I've felt increasingly like an exile, not from place, but from place-in-time. That is, I don't miss the West Coast so much as I miss being young on the West Coast. And judging by all the oldsters on YouTube music reactor video channels, that sense of longing for the freshness of the past is a pretty powerful drug, even if the past was really only the present and therefore lacked the golden hue in which it is routinely cast. Anyway, I was born in a city that seems like a capital but isn't one (Vancouver), and I live in a city that is a capital but doesn't seem like one (Edmonton), so capital cities have always been a part of my imagination. Add to that my sense of living more in time than in place, and a melancholy awareness of entering the autumn of my years, and—voila—the title emerged. But if that sounds rather grim, I'm happy to report that the long title poem, like the collection overall, is a mix of buoyant imagery and musical phrases huddling together for warmth in the cooling shadows, rather like septuagenarian Led Zeppelin fans all over the world holding butane lighters up to their computer screens.
The incomparable Tim Bowling. Picture credit: Jacqueline Baker.