Low Water Slack

by Tim Bowling

In the language of the Fraser River fishermen, "low water slack" is that particular tide when everything slows the wind, the river, even the human heartbeat. It is a time to reflect, to count the stars in Orion's belt, to listen for the slow creak of the heron's wings. During low water slack, the challenges of life on the river give way to something much deeper, and the fishermen find themselves in a world so calm and beautiful that the very water beneath them seems a hushed breath.

At once historical and intensely personal, Low Water Slack takes the reader into a vibrant world populated with such characters as a ghost of a nineteeth-century salmon canner and an 800-pound white sturgeon. Here are infamous moments of BC's past (the Hell's Gate disaster, the internment of Japanese Canadians during World War Two) alongside childhood memories of a first kiss and meditations on the future of West Coast fish stocks. And moving like a quick shadow throughout is the Pacific salmon itself, whose life cycle mirrors and guides the poet's own exploration of mortality.

Genres: Poetry

Paperback

First published January 1, 1995

Reviews

[Leslie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Fish and rivers and time and family and blood and food and history and death, with iambic pentametre and tetrametre slipping in and out of the lines, daring the reader to catch and hold the form in their nets.