"John Bowie's collection of poetry is a nod to the disenchanted travellers who speak the truth. The writer is a wordsmith of the highest degree, shaping poetry that conveys days struck by melancholy and unmistakable pain. Dead Birds & Sinking Ships is not a love story, or one connected to innocence, it is an assessment of the human condition, drunken dazes, hardship, and hopelessness. Bowie is a true craftsman, creating worlds and words that will make the reader reflect on their own time on earth. This forward-thinking and intelligent compendium will provoke response as it delivers poetry on a whole new level, one that many poets cannot grasp. And Bowie is as natural a poet as he is a novelist, sprinkling his magic with dark lines and original content. It is his time to truly shine and conquer."
- Mark McConville, Music Journalist
"Bowie's poetry is brutal and lyrical, beautifully textured, almost palpable. In Dead Birds & Sinking Ships, he depicts the contradictory world in which he grew up. A world of nature against urbanisation, reason against madness, a world of fights, real and imaginary, a world in which love, war, loneliness and trauma cohabit, that he exposes it in all its fascinating cruelty. A wonderful collection.."
- B F Jones, author of The Fabric of Tombstones
"In the darker spectrum of fiction, John Bowie has become synonymous with the sordid bleakness of his settings and characters, while punctuating an inherent sentimental and Gothic beauty. In his first poetry collection, he elevates barstool frowns into birds soaring wayward above all this. A true man-versus-the-world who's got the guts to seek universal strength in the weaknesses of the human condition, yet not without an occasional stark judgment for those who have gone beyond the brinks of redemption. An Earthshackled-romantic body of work."
- Gabriel Hart, author of Virgins In Reverse and The Intrusion; singer/songwriter of Jail Weddings.
Dead Birds & Sinking Ships is a visceral relay of emotions and disfigured memories of childhood in the country and growing old in the city. It exposes love, loss, hurt and wanting. Knowing death waits to deny us the people, places and events that make us.
