Songs of my Father

About the Book

Larsen Bowker’s three Chapbooks and seven books of poetry, take images and metaphors come from a childhood in a small Prairie town in Nebraska with more trees, hills and rivers than massive fields of grain, and found his narrative style growing up in resilient synchronicity of his parents’ polar opposite personalities—physical vigor of his Father’s inventive silence and his Mother’s lubricious loquacity, making it easy for him to believe all lives grow out of myths and physical images shaping who we are and seek to become. Both athlete and poet, he believes Faith in Body, Mind and Soul forms the character best-suited to avoid discipleship to one of the three…while “our best chance to connect all three to who we are and what we want to become is that elusive, mystical, charismatic state of being we can never quite define, but know for sure when they are in synch, as if they were as distinct as the line of our nose in three way mirrors, or the memory of our first kiss.”

About the Author

These are poems of a storyteller, his tone largely elegiac as he probes for balance in the thought/action and faith/doubt systems that give meaning to his life, searching as he says, “for the whole person I’ve always wanted to be.” In memories always threatening to become a vision, he searches for that sense of self etched on his soul by his Mother’s ‘love affair with words”, and his Father’s belief that “words are never as important as they seem to be. One critic suggests “reading his poems makes you feel as if you’re walking in radiant grace of afternoon light in autumn.” They are thought-inspired poems seeking to reclaim that slow drama and deeper texture of life lived before the 24 hour news cycles in their endless drone of words that work mightily to take the individual voice from our lives. This poet grew up in the part of Nebraska that has more limestone hills, rivers and trees than flat farmland, place his Mother made into Arcadian Myth and legend, initiating mystery into slow daily lives lived within their commitment to work, family and friends, lives lived celebrating the self as well as affirmation of others, helping to shape the character without rules. Another critic writing of poems in this author’s book “Flowers from a Deeper Soil”, called them “elegies from an unsung Master: honest, elemental and durable.” And another called them “’word journeys seeking to renew our Faith in a life greater than our immediate experience of it.”