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"Bowling brings an era to life, not with sentimentality, but with recognition of all that is vital - the moments, the people, and the present that is shaped and sustained by that time."

"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."

"These are rhythmic and colloquial, showcasing Bowling's virtuosity with the short, genre-defying--lyric but self-referential--poem. With understated and seemingly effortless humour, Bowling examines the aging process, fatherhood, mortality and alienation."

"A brilliant novel that successfully reads as poetry combined with aspects of memoir and thought-provoking cultural critique, The Heavy Bear promises there is much that is redeemable in life's next stage."

"He is a poet of rare talent. His wording is musical. His rhythms are subtle but unfaltering. He turns a phrase as nicely as anyone writing in this country, and his verses slip effortlessly into their forms as though tailor-made for his thoughts."

"It is a tribute to Bowling's mastery of expressive language that the contemporary ear not used to rhetorical inflation can find it so completely compelling and familiar. His is an exceptional lyric talent."

"Tim Bowling is one of Canada's greatest living poets."

"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!"