In spring 2020, as lockdown orders went into effect, the avian world took note. With travel restrictions in place, ruby-throated hummingbirds flew closer to airports in search of nectar, while barn swallows, Carolina wrens, and palm warblers ventured closer to highways and major roads. Black-capped chickadees, great blue herons, downy woodpeckers, and Wilson’s warblers, with their yellow-green bodies and midnight-blue heads, were spotted in large numbers around the Pacific Northwest. In parts of San Francisco, the sharp trill of male white-crowned sparrows rang low and soft in the absence of human noise. It was further proof, should anyone have needed it, that birds are cogent bioindicators—little winged aids of prophetic divination, as the augurs of ancient Greece and Rome had it. With such an abundance of species to log on apps like eBird, whose usership shot up nearly 30 percent in 2020, it makes sense that so many of the newly cloistered took to bird-watching during the pandemic. It was an edifying distraction in the merciful outdoors, where the risk of infection was lower.
As for the speaker in Sylvia Legris’s seventh collection of poems, The Principle of Rapid Peering (New Directions, 2024), the act of studying the many species of birds that frequent the marshland prairies of the poet’s native Saskatchewan isn’t merely a way to pass the time. It’s a way to make legible a period in which “a day transpires in an hour” and “the idea of calendar is off the table.” Scattered with a sparse collection of the poet’s original sketches of grass spikelets, wooly bear caterpillars, and moths—the latter of which, with their “rich acoustic world,” get plenty of attention—the poems move through the slanted and repetitive months of the pandemic, bleeding into “self-digesting” seasons. The opening poem, marked by the onset of the virus, sets the unsettled tone that shades the book’s first section.
Field-pinned in the month of purification.
The month of salt-cure and heart attack.
The year of rats and shivering pinions.Candlemas heralds thunderstorm asthma.
Woodchucks and infectious shadows.
A spring of glycerol suspension.Aspen trembles flame and owlet moths,
yellow underwings and flames to dispel.
hearsay and off-season night-flying.
In this broad sketch, the speaker’s surroundings give way to shadows, birds migrating in the dead of night and ahead of schedule, hearsay. Like the dizzying amount of information (and misinformation) that attended that first month of the pandemic, speculation abounds. Steadfast migrations are filled with uncertainty. Likewise, those neat tercets disperse and condense in the first section’s remaining poems, suggesting anything but steadiness, while end-stopped lines elicit a feeling of stagnation, of having nowhere to go and nothing but endings to look forward to. “A calendrical clot. / A six-week intercalation. / A thousand-hour schism. / An embolism.”
A finely drawn shift in the next section, “Ground Truth,” hints at the work’s quietly unfolding blueprint. The speaker, still struggling to make sense of an upside-down landscape lidded by “a larval, tutelary sky,” is on a more pointed search for order in a parkland filled with paradox. “Ground truth reveals scattered cloudy wing, / scattered clouded sulpher, / mourning cloaks of water-droplet clouds.” Soon after, in “Without Noticing It until the Moment It Moved,” birds make their first notable appearance. “A blackbird wakes and with it the urge to forage. / Hatched with a typographic knack. / An egg of brown and black hieroglyphs.” In this moment of sudden alertness, the book’s title comes into play.
The Principle of Rapid Peering, coined by the field biologist and zoologist Joseph Grinnell in the early 1920s, refers to species of birds “which themselves are almost continually in motion and thereby seek out items of food which are stationary,” as opposed to those who wait passively for food to appear. “Occasionally the field of possibilities is improved by the bird’s flicking over with its bill a leaf or two. But always the statuesque pose is quickly resumed,” writes Grinnell, inspiring another of Legris’s section headers. Even when its body is still, the bird’s eyes never stop searching. This is how it lives. As the speaker observes the pattern in “a roving aggregation of Icterids”—blackbirds, hermit thrush, magpies, meadowlarks, grackles, crows—a new mode of searching follows suit, as does an epiphany: Unlike passive-feeding birds, who engage in “the daily repetitive browse” of their immediate surroundings, rapid-peering species carry a “museum conscience. / An archive of tightly packed neurons, / a modest order amidst a complex jargon / of x’s and k’s, water-welling vowels.” Their quick-moving feet traverse the land’s “bark, branch, gravel, soil.” By the same token, the speaker takes in a more expansive view of the landscape, a “panoptical view of slough,” as the book nears its close. In a way, Legris is in conversation with Old English poets, whose riddles were often written from the perspective of birds to espouse the influence of bird thought on human thought, or birds as a means of interrogating human thought. “The path of the bird’s flight mirrors the bird’s mind moving,” observes the speaker in “False Chronologies with Birds and Moths.”
Beyond her bent for clever and industrious titles, Legris is an expert at mining the scientific lexis for poetic language. Her musical lines, varied as birdsong, don’t shy away from alliterations that stick to the roof of the mouth, nor do they miss an opportunity to list an obscure scientific name. Beyond the spell-like quality of their sound, they act as standard-bearers for the power of naming. From “Smell Giveaway (Threes on long stalks)”:
Galium triflorum
Gallium sphinx caterpillar.The breathing swale trails
the horned and hovering,the sweet-scented bedstraw
the ascending bedstraw hawkmoth.
Dusk-feeding nightfall,
a bullbatting nighthawk,a loggerhead of grebe and shrike,
pipit pipit pipit.
Despite this being Legris’s first collection dedicated to ornithology, fans of her work know she’s well-versed in the language of the natural world. “I have no background in science,” she said in an interview ahead of 2021’s Garden Physic. “I come to it as an amateur, as an explorer, on first blush swept away by the language as a beautiful and chewy tangle of syntax, sound, and evocation.”
In The Principle of Rapid Peering, Legris shapes her love of language into something larger: a cognitive framework for how to reckon with the whorl of seasons, those “unreliable chronologies,” that make up a life. We’re left with “Recollections of the Future,” the only poem in the book that contains the word “you,” a direct address to both speaker and reader that warns against moving (or not moving) through the world passively, like a bird that waits for food to come. “If you ate and slept at the same time you would wake to sirens and loud / knocks and diminishing weather on the other side of the door.” For the poet, moving and thinking with constant attentiveness—to the ground and sky, its smallest creatures—is a way to live.
