In this collection of essays Tim Bowling picks up the common questions, and beauties, of life and examines them closely. From questions of love and money to the search for solitude in a clamouring world, to poetry and the place of art today, Bowling writes thoughtfully on what it means to be alive. In the end, we come back to the moon, the trees, the salmon that swim to the sea and the call of the red-winged blackbird, which his mother imitated to call him inside at night, as a child.

Tim Bowling has published numerous poetry collections, including Low Water Slack; Dying Scarlet (winner of the 1998 Stephan G. Stephansson Award for poetry); Darkness and Silence (winner of the Canadian Authors Association Award for Poetry); The Witness Ghost; and The Memory Orchard (both nominated for the Governor General's Literary Award). He is also the author of three novels, Downriver Drift (Harbour), The Paperboy's Winter (Penguin) and The Bone Sharps (Gaspereau Press). His first book of non-fiction, The Lost Coast: Salmon, Memory and the Death of Wild Culture (Nightwood Editions), was shortlisted for three literary awards: The Writers' Trust Nereus Non-Fiction Award, the BC Book Prizes' Roderick Haig-Brown Regional Prize and the Alberta Literary Awards' Wilfred Eggleston Award for Non-Fiction. The Lost Coast was also chosen as a 2008 Kiriyama Prize "Notable Book." Bowling is the recipient of the Petra Kenney International Poetry Prize, the National Poetry Award and the Orillia International Poetry Prize. Bowling was the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2008. A native of the West Coast, he now lives in Edmonton Alberta. His latest collection of poetry is Tenderman (Nightwood), due out in fall 2011.

Tim Bowling's profile page

• Short-listed, Alberta Literary Award for Memoir

"These essays are filled with quiet wisdom, hard-won insights about everyday life, a stirring love of the natural world, a poignant passion for life heightened by clear-sighted awareness of its brevity, and a rare intimacy and candour, as if Bowling is confiding these stories and thoughts to his closest loved one."

AlbertaViews

"His writing is beautiful and very poignant, so readers will no doubt take away their own impressions from these moving passages."

British Columbia Review

"Serious readers of personal essays know how hard it is to keep just a few matters in the air, let alone all this. I kept bracing for the break-up and crash, but to my astonishment the essay lands perfectly. I gasped audibly with surprise and delight for the first time in my reading life."

Alone on a Windy Ridge