BIRDS IN THE HAND
Fiction and Poetry about Birds
Edited by
Kent and Dylan Nelson
North Point Press
Hardcover, 374 pages, $24
ISBN 0-86547-673-X
Previously published in Bloomsbury Review
The
novel Land That Moves, Land That Stands Still has brought some
long-deserved recognition to Kent Nelson.
Now, as a fine follow up, Kent and his daughter Dylan have compiled an
anthology of fiction and poetry, Birds in the Hand: Fiction and Poetry about Birds. The back flap includes a snapshot of a
younger
What did the bird mean? It was the fulfillment of a quest, a shared
experience with my brother and my father, an evocation of wildness and
solitude. As a threatened species, the
owl was a quiet rebuke and a reminder that we are all endangered. And it was, simply, magnificent to see. These are only partial answers. What does any bird mean, within a moment s
experience or the sweep of life?
Her father provides part of the answer. He refers to a character in one of his novels who explains why he took a friend to see a Yellow Rail: because birds on in me. They are in my blood like a language. They were what I first knew how to love.
The nature of the poems and stories in this anthology reveal the editors passions for their subject. Consider this from Li-Young Lee s Praise Them.
The birds don t alter space.
They
reveal it. The sky
never
fills with any
leftover
flying. They leave
nothing
to trace. It is our own
astonishment
collects
in
chill air. Be glad.
Many well-known authors find a place here, but some of the finest work is by those lesser known. Take David Waggoner s story The Bird Watcher which juxtaposes the solitude sought by a birder in the woods with the wild risk of a hang-glider skimming the trees overhead. Waggoner works the necessary arc of the story but also says much about the simple fact of being:
He watched birds,
all right, but the most intense pleasure came just from being somewhere
natural. He didn t need anything as
grand as whole landscape: a small
clearing in the woods could do it or a bend in a creek or a place like this
small, rain-fed, permanently shaded swamp, where he could look and learn and
renew a powerful and healing sense of belonging momentarily to a dependable
order. He didn t meditate. His mind went nowhere else in time, didn t
even go into itself. It was an intimate
joining with the Here and Now, as reassuring as love, as valuable and
memorable, though not as long-lasting.
And he was afraid of giving these sometimes prolonged moments any kind
of important name for fear they d stop happening.
If such moments provide transient healing
for the vicissitudes of life, Waggoner shows it doesn t take long for tragedy
to quickly intrude again. In this vein
there is also Sheri Joseph s brilliant story The Elixir about a mother s
nursing a wounded hummingbird with the magic of a spoonful of sugar small but
welcome solace after facing down the inability to heal her prodigal daughter s
terminal tuberculosis. Such symbolic
connections continue in Richard Wilbur s poem The Writer, in which he compares
his daughter s difficulty in tapping out a story on a typewriter to a starling
trapped in the same room, unable to find, for the longest time, the window they
opened for it. William Archilla s fine
poem Bird evokes the geography of
If these writers display a form of natural realism, with words as clear as spring water, then another kind of clarity comes from stories more fantastic, such as Jealous Husband Returns in Form of a Parrot, in which Robert Olen Butler spins off Kafke s famous story about waking up as a cockroach. Similarly, in Flight, John L Heureux depicts a priest in love whose pain grows into a knot on his side, rupturing into a blackbird. And in Emory Bear Hands Birds, Barry Lopez tells the tale of a Native American in prison who teaches other inmates to let wildlife into their souls, and who become birds to escape by flying away.
In a volume compiled by devoted birders, the sole hunting story is a window into the soul of both hunter and hunted. By Jim Harrison, it s an excerpt from his early novel Farmer, where the protagonist Joseph shoots a woodcock and finds it wounded and fluttering in tall grass. When he catches it in his hands, the bird twists its head around, staring directly at Joseph with a glint of the morning sun shining off its retinas. Unable to return the bird s gaze, Joseph shuts his eyes before he snaps the bird s neck. Trembling, he sits down:
How could he
become so nervous after thirty years of hunting? He had never looked into a bird s eyes before
and it had at least temporarily unnerved him.
He tried to ignore how nearly human the eyes looked, but he couldn t rid
his mind totally of the idea: eyes are
what we hold most in common in terms of similarity to other beasst. He always cringed when he hooked a fish in
the eye. When they slaughtered both
cattle and pigs the eyes stayed open in death.
But it was more than that: the
woodcock was warm, palpable, it quivered, and its eyes did not blink under his
gaze.
What Kent and Dylan Nelson have accomplished in this anthology is a testimony to the ongoing mystery of birds, the mystery of the human heart.
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