In the Capital City of Autumn

April 16, 2024
88 pages | 978-1-989496-86-2

Tim Bowling is in top form in his latest collection of poetry, In the Capital City of Autumn. 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.

Advance Praise

“Tim Bowling’s latest poetry collection, In the Capital City of Autumn, reads like a ‘Report Card for Middle Age,’ the name of a poem in Part Three of the book, but the subjects of study are less rote learning, more free-wheeling, more expansive – family history, salmon fishing, The Great Gatsby and F. Scott Fitzgerald, the passage of time, the particulars of loss, André the Giant, Superman comics – making this an incredibly satisfying collection. And what poetic lines! ‘My life hung like a dog’s paw to shake,’ or ‘I wore my mourning suit of rain,’ or ‘I was that child, am that thief, / stealing what all my neighbours steal – / the hour hand on the town clock.’ His poems cast a wide net over popular culture and antiquarian literature, the regional and the broadly universal. Bowling, in his poems, gazes upon these subjects, and slowly the moorings of the self slip away, and in that silence, the voice of the imagination enters, helping him transcend our hardscrabble lives, transcend time itself. This is what makes Tim Bowling’s poetry so shamelessly lyrical, so powerfully stirring. An important and vital poetic vision!”
– Chris Banks, author of Alternator and Deepfake Serenade

Reviews

A poet glimpses his soul and mortality: ‘Please return my life of tender purpose to its memory’ (gillian harding-russell, The Fiddlehead, Autumn 2024)
And on this reminder of our shared mortality, the poet urges kindness to offset the scrabble of life and society and politics. In the Capital City of Autumn is a collection of poems that speaks to our souls with a lyric at once personal and profound that is, by turns, down-to-earth and offset by irony with aperçu glimpses of self.

REVIEW OF TIM BOWLING’S “IN THE CAPITAL CITY OF AUTUMN” (Catherine Owen, Freefall Magazine, 11/08/2024)
"The titular poem is especially powerful as it repeats the line, 'In the Capital City of Autumn' in stanzas that embed moving slant rhymes such as 'pear/here,' and 'thief/sleep' along with syllabically-varied rhymes such as 'scarecrows/snow' to draw a potent picture of middle age that pulses with dream imagery inflected by poets like Neruda, Stevens, and Vallejo."

In The Capital City of Autumn (Sarah Hailstone, Sarah Hailstone, 19/07/2024)
"Traces a chronology of age and evokes a nostalgia of childhood with the testament of domestic residue of life and the newness of meaning through expertly positioned language."

In the Capital City of Autumn (The Artisanal Writer, 29/07/2024)
A lovely interview with Tim Bowling up at the Artisanal Writer. (Please note that access is restricted to members, but a membership is free to sign up for.)

Interviews

POWER Q & A WITH TIM BOWLING (River Street Writing, 07/05/2024)
"Capital cities have always been a part of my imagination."

The (CanL)It Crowd: Tim Bowling (Hollay Ghadery, hollayghadery.ca, 06/03/2024)
"I derive most comfort and inspiration, perhaps, from long-dead and sometimes obscure, largely forgotten authors. They help me to understand that the power of literature, or at least its measurable effect, is really beyond our control and our own lifetimes."

Articles

Excerpt from In the Capital City of Autumn by Tim Bowling (River Street Writing, 05/10/2024)
Tim shares an excerpt from In the Capital City of Autumn.

Two Poems: In the Capital City of Autumn (Tim Bowling, All Lit Up, 15/08/2024)
It's lovely to have an excerpt from Tim Bowling's lovely collection In the Capital City of Autumn up at All Lit Up.

Excerpt

Click here to read an excerpt of In the Capital City of Autumn.

About the Author

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.

Other Titles by This Author

The Marvels of Youth (2023)

The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird: Essays on the Common and Extraordinary (2021)

The Dark Set: New Tenderman Poems (2019)

The Heavy Bear (2017)