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The Thin Smoke of the Heart

Tim Bowling author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:McGill-Queen's University Press

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The Thin Smoke of the Heart cover

Vow, a bald eagle in a riverside fir stares at the uncarved faces of a thousand pumpkins sagging into frost behind a barn of faded planks. Hours pass. Who will blink first? It is that sort of morning for the heart; the living are giving the dead an honest test. A man has walked out to be alone with the earth. A man of his age, he equates time with grief most days, but now he has decided to wait. In the silence, where do his raised eyes fit? I'm not that man, I'm not between the fir and the rot of the pumpkin fields, but I'll pick up the gauntlet of his morning nonetheless, stand to the side of the fierce contest and not make the eyes of the eagle shift.

"There is a resolve, a high moral purpose to everything Bowling is doing here, coupled with a compelling melancholy and an astounding level of artistry. With his grasp of the human condition and his lyric gifts, he has the tools to become not just a good poet, but a great one." Arc "Bowling's poems exceed expectations. His universe, suffused with the flux of water, is wondrous." UBC Chronicle

ISBN: 9780773519053

Dimensions: unknown

Weight: unknown

90 pages