(This review is a haibun of sorts, because it’s National Poetry Writing Month.)

I was exhausted last night, but because it was the first day of National Poetry Writing Month, I thought I might celebrate by reading a couple of poems. After all, my friend Kim Fahner seems to be celebrating by reading a book of poetry every day this month, and while I doubt I’m capable of that feat, I ought to be able to read at least one poem, right? So I picked up Tim Bowling’s recent book, In the Capital City of Autumn, which has been shortlisted for the 2025 Al and Eurithe Purdy Poetry Prize. I know Bowling’s work a little–I reviewed his 2022 book of essays, The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird, and I have one of his poems, “Teaching First-Year University,” taped to my office door–and I was curious to see what this book has to offer.

Even though I only intended to read a couple of poems before turning off the light and falling asleep, I couldn’t put this book down–and not just because the jacket copy quotes my review of The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird, either. It’s just really good. The book consists of five sections of varying lengths. In three of those, Bowling reflects on his life and family history; in another, he imagines the thoughts of minor characters in F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby; and, in the last, he mourns the death of his dog. It helps to know a little about his life, as I do from reading The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird–the fact that Bowling grew up near the Fraser River in a rural community that has since been swallowed up by Vancouver, that his father fished for salmon, that sometimes his father bartered salmon for vegetables with local farmers–but that knowledge isn’t absolutely necessary. In ways, though, In the Capital City of Autumn and The Call of the Red-Winged Blackbird are companions, written at more or less the same time, reflecting on some of the same experiences.

I particularly loved the poems about The Great Gatsby, a book I’ve thought about since I read it in Grade 13, particularly its last sentence: “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” So lovely, that sentence, and so pessimistic: it suited my youthful melancholia, but these days, while I acknowledge the force the past exerts on us as individuals and as a collective, I want to think about the ways we can, if not escape the past, move away from it. There must be a word for poems that reflect on a text the way Bowling does here, something akin to the term “ekphrasis.” Maybe one of my readers, someone more intelligent or knowledgeable than me, will fill me in. In particular, I loved “The Butler with the Thumb, Ten Years Later,” which imagines Gatsby’s butler, whose primary function in the household (as I recall) was to operate an electric machine that, with a press of his thumb, turned oranges into orange juice. Ten years after Gatsby’s (spoiler alert!) death, that butler, now unemployed after the economic collapse of the Great Depression, remembers that summer of parties and carelessness:

How like the dim headlight
of a death car
the moon is
swerving across the lane,
how like a worn thumb
pressing with monotonous purpose
to extract the bitter juice of the world.

I like the link between (another spoiler!) the death of Myrtle Wilson, Gatsby’s lover, who is run over by Daisy Buchanan, a hit-and-run for which Gatsby takes the responsibility, and the butler’s juice-making, and the moon above Long Island that’s asserted here, and I understand why the butler would see the world’s juice as “bitter,” given his experience that summer and afterwards. At the same time, though, I wonder why that’s the adjective employed in the poem’s final lines. The orange juice the butler made would’ve been sweet; otherwise, nobody would’ve wanted it, and he would’ve been given some other task. I guess I want the world to be sweet, at least sometimes. I don’t want The Great Gatsby‘s sadness to be so dominant. In the Capital City of Autumn is lovely, and while I understand its tendency towards a minor key, all too well, that’s not the only thing we might write about.

Still, this is a strong collection, full of beautiful lines and images, and I’m glad I read it. As I did, I came up with this rough haiku, which is, yes, melancholy, despite my desire not to dwell in sadness:

How I wish I too could make
such lovely things with words–
not yet, perhaps, but maybe someday.

There–a poem for NaPoWriMo, which makes this post into a haibun. Maybe not a very good one, but that’s okay. Maybe I’ll reread The Great Gatsby as part of this blogging project. I think the copy I bought in 1982 (we had to purchase our own textbooks in Grade 13, you know) is on my bookshelves somewhere. If I do, you’ll be the first to know, and I’ll be sure to give Tim Bowling the credit for inspiring me.