Dark Set, The: New Tenderman Poems

by Tim Bowling

A tenderman is a crew member of a fishing vessel, a fisherman, someone who hauls live fish to the shore every day. In The Dark Set , the Tenderman is a character from another time, a worker in a lost resource culture, who is both a breathing artifact of a rough-edged, wilder past and a representative of uncomfortable human traits that rise out of ignorance and a failure of empathy. A fiercely independent everyman, the Tenderman is Bowling's way of wrestling with his own conflicted feelings about masculinity, history, citizenship and power. The division between the poet and the tenderman is wide, but he is a kind of shadow brother, a solitary visitor from a world North America repeatedly tries, and fails, to leave behind.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

Published May 7, 2019

Reviews

[Alberta Views Magazine]

As the title suggests, Edmonton poet Tim Bowling’s 14th book of poetry, The Dark Set: New Tenderman Poems, revisits the lost salmon-fishing culture of British Columbia’s Fraser Valley. Originally from the West Coast, Bowling wrestled with the loss of this way of life, which was embodied by the title character in his 2011 collection Tenderman. The tenderman is a fisherman, a “fiercely independent everyman.” He is a working-class archetype, representing resource extraction industries and their historically masculine cultures—and our own uncertain relationship with them. These new poems pick up where that conversation left off.

The reunion of narrator and tenderman comes across as tired and cynical and occasionally bewildered, but it is not without humour. They’ve aged since their last meeting, and the world around them has changed. The narrator, perhaps, realizes how much he and the tenderman have in common.

Review by Kelly Shepherd
Full review at https://albertaviews.ca/dark-set-new-...