The Witness Ghost

Ronald Charles Epstein is a Toronto-based freelance writer and published poet.

Although Edmonton author Tim Bowling has written two novels and a
collection of interviews with Canadian poets, he has found his greatest
success as a poet. Dying Scarlet was awarded the 1998 Stephan G.
Stephansson Alberta Book Award and Darkness and Silence won the 2001
Canadian Authors Association Poetry Prize. This book honours Hector
(Heck) Bowling, the author’s father, a salmon fisherman who worked
British Columbia’s Fraser River. His 2001 death inspires both elegies
and reflections.

Bowling’s style can be sublime. “Annual Drive to Pick Up the New
Net at the Cannery” is a childhood recollection told as a narrative.
This form may lead some readers to wonder whether this tale is merely
arranged as verse—until they read the line, “Our father reaped a
constant crop of seeing.” That line is too imaginative and its cadence
is too measured for it to be dismissed as routine or prosaic.

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 /
mushroom-soft, red-pulping / their birth waters.”

In this book, the author commemorates his father by expressing personal
sentiments with discipline and intelligence.