Harold Bowes has written a dignified little book. if nothing else seems like a sustained showcase of the mind of man in middle age. Its mode is casual observation: of trips by car and airplane, of coat hooks and sidewalk drawings in which faces look like headstones. The sense is of one who notices things, or remembers noticing things - one who doesn't want or perhaps doesn't know how to do more than remark and recollect. From the opening reference to "floating clouds" through the book's sixth and final section called "these clouds", a mood of disciplined placidity is maintained.

In literature as in life, dogged passivity can be irritating, and what is offered as resolve might simply be read as retreat. The sham sensors sound when we see lines like:

that a river would bend
it's nearly too much to think about

Entirely too much, apparently, for the fruit of follow-up thought is not in evidence. The final lines of "Dream, Dream, Dream, Dream" have a touch of timorousness, too:

Then I'm swimming and swimming never certain
if the ring is still there and I'm so worried I forget
all about the wife.
I'm far out in a great expanse of water and
my wedding ring keeps almost slipping off.
My wife is there, somehow, so I'm afraid or
maybe

Here and in other places we see suggestion and the apprehension of possibility but no subsequent stone cutting, no interpretation or extrapolation. A representative selection:

just to know
that it is orange
inside this cantaloupe
is enough
for now

What is observable will suffice. Since I take this to be what Bowes meant I would say that his modest but real achievement is the consistent presentation of a "still point at the center" sensibility, with its hints of recoil and resolution. This sensibility is sustained through the book's 58 short pages, and Bowes's craft seems evident in the selection. For instance, his poem "God I Love this Bar" is posted on pigironmalt.com, along with "Evening light"; the latter is in if nothing else, but the one about the bar is not and would have been out of place if it were. It is to the credit of Bowes and/or his editors at Ravenna Press that it and perhaps other prospects were set aside for these subdued selections, in which we hear a voice that is mature if not wise and consistent if not quite consistently content.