There are generations of amateur naturalists in my family, and there was always a pair of binoculars on the sill of the largest window in my parents’ house. So I welcomed the paperback edition of Bright Wings, an accurately illustrated anthology of poems about birds. It contains many beautifully arresting poems with the kind of detailed observation and musicality one expects of the best poetry. Painter David Allen Sibley is justly famous for avian renderings, which here often show creatures in flight and in groups, making their portraits especially vivid. Each illustration has descriptive prose at the bottom of its page, all of which is useful and some of which is the stuff of “found poetry.”
Billy Collins is a former United States Poet Laureate, and while I recommend this book for its visual and lyrical delights, it contains some dismaying omissions . The title, from “God’s Grandeur” by Gerard Manley Hopkins, should be familiar to anyone who made it through high school English, and Collins says nothing about why he chose it. Collins also says little about the reasoning behind most of his selections, so it is a mystery why Bright Wings contains two pieces by the consistently excellent Jane Hirshfield, two by the late Amy Clampitt, whose work is worthy of wider attention, and none by former United States Poet Laureates Robert Hayden and Rita Dove, or any other prominent writer of color. Hayden’s “A Plague of Starlings” came quickly to mind for its unflinching originality, and was easy to find in his Collected Poems. Wanda Coleman has written a riveting piece about the California Condor, and Camille Dungy and Ethelbert Miller have written better poems about birds than some of what Bright Wings contains. All three have won awards. It’s also odd that Collins would not make room for “Epitaph for a Bird” by Spain’s immortal Lorca.
Collins says he wants “to give the reader a better chance of being taken by surprise,” and he surprised me by repeating Auden’s quote that “poetry makes nothing happen.” Those words were overexposed to the point of cliché in 82’, when I made the mistake of using it them an essay, and Collins says it caused “people to repeat that line to excess.”
His quest for surprise is noted after the “fresh approach” he claims to take by showcasing so many living poets. Linda Pastan admits to confusing Morning Dove with Mourning Dove, and credits the legendary field guide author Roger Tory Peterson with setting her straight. The following passage and the whole poem make me yawn:
But when the book said
Mourning Doves instead
I noticed their ash-gray feathers,
like shadows
on the underside
of love.
Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney. Pulitzer Prize winner Mary Oliver. And Kay Ryan and Chaucer and Wordsworth, Emily Dickinson, Thomas Hardy and Thoreau. All excellent poets with well deserved places in the canon, and fine examples of their work is in this collection. There’s also a sluggish piece by John Ciardi, best known as an influential editor in my grandfather’s day. Collins’ approach is less fresh than puzzling, given what he says he wants to achieve.
These serious irritations aside, Bright Wings has plenty of poems that provide pleasure and sustenance. Timothy Steele, one of the best of the “new formalists” has perfect pitch in “Black Phoebe” :
Her swoops are short and low and don’t aspire
To more, is seems, than nature’s common strife.
Perching, she strops her bill upon a wire
As though she’d barbered in a former life.
When the wire rocks. She quickly slips her tail
A few times, and her balance doesn’t fail.
If she display an unassuming pride-
Compact, black-capped, black breast puffed to the sun-
The sentiment perhaps is justified :
Mosquitoes, gnats, and flies would overrun
Much of the planet within several years
But for her and her insectivorous peers.
Not prone, as are the jays, to talking trash,
She offers quieter companionship;
On summers days, when starlings flap and splash
And make the birdbath overspill and drip
Or empty out its basin altogether,
She seeks the shade and waits for cooler weather.
Lisa Williams has two fine poems that more than hold their own. “Grackles” is gently kinetic and wise, with a spiritual whiff, as in “one body, ” “some order” and the “gray air” of a “Sunday” :
They were not one body. Yet they seemed
held together by some order, their thick necks
flickering with a blue-black iridescence,
their yellow-circled pupils bright and cold.
In a wave of differences that passed
low over the surface of my yard,
they picked it clean of morning’s fritillaries
and other summer gestures fall discards
then settled on the hill behind the fence
for several teeming minutes to remark
its tapestry, each razored beak, each tail
parting Sunday’s gray air like a spear.
I could tell you they gathered up
the darkness of my winter thought that day
in mid-September, bundled it, black-ribboned,
into sleek coats and lifted it from me
just as you have imagined. But this
would be a lie. I watched them comb the fields
with interest, and, when their beak’s clicks had died,
turned back to what I was.
The emotionally tortured Delmore Schwartz, who died much too soon, achieved heartbreaking perfection with ‘The Ballet of the Fifth Year.” It is illustrated by three gulls in flight—an ordinary scene made exalting in execution that does justice to the words without overwhelming them. From beginning to end, the poem honors that sacred place where artistic gift meets craft and memory:
Where the sea gulls sleep, or indeed where they fly
Is a place of different traffic. Although I
Consider the fishing bay (where I see them dip and curve
And purely glide) a place that weakens the nerve
Of will, and closes my eyes, as they should not be
(They should burn like the street- light all night quietly,
So that whatever is present will be known to me),
Nevertheless the gulls and the imagination
Of where they sleep, which comes to creation
In strict shape and color, from their dallying
Their wings slowly, and suddenly rallying
Over, up, down the arabesque of descent,
Is an old act enacted, by fabulous intent
When I skated, afraid of policemen, five years old,
In the winter sunset, sorrowful and cold,
Hardly attained to thought, but old enough to know
Such grace, so self-contained, was the best escape to know.
Every anthology comes with limitations. Publishers often cannot afford to make them as large as compilers would wish, and most people actively engaged with poetry will hope for more, or for different selections in any collection. Good, safe anthologies like this one should also encourage readers to seek out more material about birds and words, of many colors, from many continents and cultures.
