I will read anything that Robert Macfarlane writes. But when I started The Book of Birds: A Field Guide to Wonder and Loss, I was even more flabbergasted than usual. Each short piece about a once-common bird is a poem. The book blurb says, “The Book of Birds is a field guide with a difference: It shows readers not just how to identify birds, but also how to identify with them.” Nothing could be truer. Here’s a snippet to prove that this is a prose poetry mentor text (gorgeously illustrated, btw) in disguise:
Cuckoo (Cuculus canorus)
Where to start with you, Cuckoo? Your one-two call, perhaps, from high on oak or yew, which heralds spring anew then beats out summer’s hot tattoo. The curious beauty of your feathers; their smalty blue, their smoky, petrol hue. And we must not forget, of course, the chilling trick you pull on other birds — your devious, monstrous switcheroo.What a curious-looking creature you are, Cuckoo. Gawky, heavy, bulgy: a badly stuffed raptor, as if you’ve pilfered yourself in bits like a bodysnatcher — your barred chest from goshawk, your tail feathers from woodpecker, your yellow moorhen legs, your scythe-like falcon wings. Only those mad, staring eyes seem wholly yours, Cuckoo: off-kilter, askew, focused on some unseen, unholy other-world view.
Macfarlane uses all the poetry moves — internal-, end-, and off-rhyme, alliteration, perfect word choice (including, in almost every piece, a word I have to look up — smalty, in this case, from smalt, which is “a deep blue pigment, consisting of a powdered glass that contains oxide of cobalt”), and surprise. If you read the pieces/essays/poems aloud, you hear and feel the rhythm. And through it all, he teaches: “Macfarlane describes each bird’s habits and habitats, their patterns of flight and patterns of song, how they hunt or fish or scavenge or gather, how they nest and raise their chicks, the myths that attend them, the threats that shadow them–and how their lives intersect with our own.”
(Ooh! I found another excerpt of the book here.)
This is a book I’m savoring, just as I savor the dwindling number and kinds of birds we see and hear in the neighborhood, and who we welcome to our yard and feeders (around 50% of bird species are in decline worldwide). I can still remember great flocks and great variety, but those younger than me experience shifting baseline syndrome –“when each generation treats a diminished natural world as “normal,” so fewer birds or insects may not feel unusual because people are comparing it to what they’ve seen in their own lifetime.”
Here’s to the diversity and abundance we have left, and may we work to protect ALL of our neighbors on this rarest of all planets.
Tanita has this week’s Poetry Friday roundup at {fiction, instead of lies}.
A(nother) Year of Reading 