Review of Tim Bowling\u27s The Duende of Tetherball

Harding-Russell, Gillian

English

Wilfrid Laurier University

The GooseVolume 15 | No. 2 Article 12-2-2017The Duende of Tetherball by Tim BowlingGillian Harding-RussellUniversity of SaskatchewanPart of the Critical and Cultural Studies Commons, Literature in English, North AmericaCommons, Nature and Society Relations Commons, and the Place and Environment CommonsFollow this and additional works at / Suivez-nous ainsi que d’autres travaux et œuvres:https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegooseThis article is brought to you for free and open access by Scholars Commons @ Laurier. It has been accepted for inclusion in The Goose by anauthorized editor of Scholars Commons @ Laurier. For more information, please contact scholarscommons@wlu.ca.Cet article vous est accessible gratuitement et en libre accès grâce à Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Le texte a été approuvé pour faire partie intégrantede la revue The Goose par un rédacteur autorisé de Scholars Commons @ Laurier. Pour de plus amples informations, contactezscholarscommons@wlu.ca.Recommended Citation / Citation recommandéeHarding-Russell, Gillian. "The Duende of Tetherball by Tim Bowling." The Goose, vol. 15 , no. 2 , article 1, 2017,https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss2/1.  Conviction and Tolerance in a Complex World  The Duende of Tetherball by TIM BOWLING Nightwood Editions, 2016   Reviewed by GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL  In The Duende of Tetherball, Tim Bowling broaches the subject of the middle-aged self in an argumentative and sometimes faltering world. As the son of deceased parents and the father of his children, the speaker tries to make sense of his ancestry in a line of fishermen and of present day society with inevitable ecological glimpses into the state of the environment. While he borrows metaphors from nature, the rural workplace, and childhood games, Bowling writes verses that are alternatively sinuous and long or leaping into short bursts of song.  The speaker in Bowling's poems is always aware of where he comes from and of his place in a less-than-perfect society. Most often, he chooses the isolation of the self to preserve his own integrity. In the lyrical "The Children of Fishermen," the speaker recalls his roots as the son of generations of fishermen:   We wore gumboots that glistened    like the flanks of horses.  And slipped them off inside the rain-    rattled  porches  as the salmon slipped off every tide.  We heard the glass floats being   blown in Japan.  Our closest friends were dogs and   blood.  (14-18)  Following this nostalgic look at the past, we are brought abruptly to the present with the speaker looking introspectively into the middle distance around his bed and visualizing his own face "carved / out of my father's face" (21-22), but with no one left alive to tell his story when "crying to a sleeping people / is a lonely way to tell" (24-25).  In several of the poems, Bowling offers his view on his struggle of coming to terms with society. In the title poem, "The Duende of Tetherball," he draws on the poet Federico Garcia Lorca's term "duende" with its emotional/physical conception of struggle to consider the game of tetherball as emblematic of "a purely democratic / violence" (14). In this game, the punches are set against oneself or others in an emotional or intellectual battle of wits:   You wrapped the leather ball   around the pole by punching it  against another's punches   or your own, a purely democratic   violence of the kind   that teaches every one   of us, in time. Useless — (14-20)  In an alternative perspective, the tetherball itself is seen as emblematic of the "bully" who has “no victim” but himself, akin to "a tree / stripped by acid rain, / a one-armed boxer with a single glove" (29-33). Thus Bowling seems to go beyond easy blame to slip into a larger view of our social problems that may be explained in pragmatic, rather than moralistic, ways. Far from setting himself above the rabble in this game of tetherball, the speaker asks, "Did I say I 1Harding-Russell: The Duende of Tetherball by Tim BowlingPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2017  didn't play?" And he answers his own question, "Who doesn't play? (34).  Another poem that establishes the poet's sense of social responsibility is "Telephone Survey." Here, Bowling begins the poem, "Do I want others to be like me?" to which the answers is an emphatic "No" (1-2):   I would have my children live   with the terrifying risk of difference   to the precipice of tragedy   to the obliteration of the meaning  of my days. (40-44)  Although the speaker admits that he would prefer the world to be a better place, uniformity of opinion is not the answer. His most eloquent and wise closing words are "for it is a crime to command life: / and the prison is a mirror that shows a single face” (17-18).  In half poem/half prose "Animal Solitude," Bowling dramatises the story of a woman's accidental collision with nature as she runs over a deer with a car. Whereas the poem begins with verses that are most lyrical in which the sun's rays are seen as "roadkill," most surely an omen that warns the reader, the poem moves into prose on the second page (where the woman's busy life is profiled) and then moves back to verse during the emotional scene of the accident in which the woman's empathy with the animal and their shared pain is captured so viscerally:   But who can be the self - the   vanished self -   with the dying buck's head   gashed and twisting in your lap,  the antlers pinning you behind the   wheel  each short rasp torn from punctured   lungs (80-85)  The last section of the poem, in returning to prose, ends with a trucker's matter-of-fact "It's a nice buck," and "Too bad you can't eat it. The meat's bruised" (123). Here we see how two truths collide: the woman's sorrow and pain (her empathy very like pain) on killing the deer and a potential benefit as seen in a larger scheme that, however, does not deny the original sorrow about a loss.  Not unexpected in a poem about middle age and a less-than-perfect world, Bowling writes two poems about writer friends who have died. The first one is for Philip Levine, a poet who boasted that he was inspired to write by his boring job at work and by his contributions to unions. There is much camaraderie in the elegy's bantering opening lines: "I keep expecting a letter from you. / Dear Tim I died on Valentine's Day. It sucks" (1-2).   Phil, however much I want you alive   is not a fraction of the amount   you would want your life back  the poems unwritten  the forge's heat in your face    (39-43)  Here we have the portrait of a poet who evidently has much remaining to write about, a poet who "hated / lies, would hate the lie / that art is the essence of a life" (28-30).  The other elegy is for fellow Newfoundlander Alistair MacLeod, whom 2The Goose, Vol. 15, No. 2 [2017], Art. 1https://scholars.wlu.ca/thegoose/vol15/iss2/1  the speaker cannot remember whether dying before or after the Scottish referendum. (I do believe it was after, so MacLeod may rest in peace.) There is much love and familiarity in the unexpected closing observation that short story and fiction writer Macleod was a "national poet" who "meticulously translated all his poems into prose" (51).  In his latest collection of poems The Duende of the Tetherball, Bowling writes with honesty and conviction, with frustration and warmth for his fellow humans. Furthermore, he writes with a will to be open-minded despite a personal need to isolate himself as the only way to survive in a world of diversity. His metaphors are often startling and unique as drawn from the environment, the rural workplace, and children's games (as the homely central tetherball image), and his cadence varied as song mingled with speech.  GILLIAN HARDING-RUSSELL is a freelance writer and editor working for a number of magazines, among them Event’s Reading Service. She received an M.A. from McGill (76) and her Ph.D. from the University of Saskatchewan (1986). She has three poetry collections and five chapbooks published. This year a poem sequence "Making Sense" was chosen as the best suite in Exile's Gwendolyn MacEwen chapbook competition (2016). A chapbook, Fox Love, came out last fall in The Alfred Gustav Press series. 3Harding-Russell: The Duende of Tetherball by Tim BowlingPublished by / Publié par Scholars Commons @ Laurier, 2017

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The Duende of Tetherball by Tim Bowling

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