"In the Midst of Chaos, Still the Birds" by Denise Low

In the midst of chaos, still the birds

Denise Low All Morning the Crows by Meg Kearney, The Word Works, 2021.

I became acquainted with Meg Kearney’s poetry in her first book, An Unkindness of Ravens (BOA Editions, 2001), which deftly moves between human and avian worlds. The “unkindness” in the title refers to the collective noun for the large black birds of the corvid family. Twenty years later, in her fourth book of poetry, Kearney elaborates on ravens, crows, grackles, and the fancier birds as well, parrots and flamingoes— almost fifty types altogether. All Morning the Crows, winner of the Washington Prize, is a poetic bird catalogue, with lyrical and informative entries.

I recently read an interview with a literary journal editor who bemoaned all the bird poems in the slush pile. And indeed most are banal, as writers struggle to invent new tropes—Keats’s immortal nightingale ever more elusive as the decades go by. But this book is a triumph. Kearney succeeds in part because of the depth of research that lies behind each poem. First, she looks backward to historic knowledge about the feathered angels of this world, often via a book published by Diana Wells, 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names (Algonquin Books, 2002). This is a compendium of biblical, Middle Ages, and more recent historical tales about bird species. The notes in the back of the book are, informally, poems themselves as Kearney selects quotations from Wells and other sources. The lowly sparrow is enlivened with

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this description, in the notes: “The Venerable Bede compared the human soul to a little ‘sparrow,’ flitting down a hall: ‘It enters in at one door and quickly flies out through the other’” (Wells, quoted by Kearney). Six pages of such notes are worth a separate reading.

The poem “Sparrow,” in the body of the book, begins with Bede’s comment, paraphrased in couplets, and continues with additional imagery of a dust bath. The soul “flutters” in Kearney’s poem, as well as faith, combining the polarity with the ending: . . . Oh, my very being wants to believe— but my faith, that sparrow, flutters. So when my grave’s been dug, when they lower my dust into the ground, may a host of sparrows bathe with me.

May we fling that fresh earth skyward, Then lift our faces as it rains back down.

Kearney draws on earliest English-language sources to contemplate her own death in the future. This intermingling of timeframes is one way the poet renews the commonplace.

The house sparrow is a familiar, like a crone’s cat, when the poet turns to the theme of mortality. The poem itself flutters between lyricism and something else—not narration, but rather exposition. The opening and closing door, the quick flits of sparrows, the quick term of a lifespan, and the biblical “dust to dust”—all balance in this energetic turning of words.

The couplets move effectively without fanfare, but with a metronome’s inevitability.

After a year of COVID-19 pestilence and murders of people of color, this collection connects readers to companionship with

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birds, a stable comfort. The book also breaks new ground, as in the poem “Heron,” which compares a startled heron’s ungainly flight to a woman escaping a rapist. The self-imprisonment of curfews and quarantines appears in the poem “Cardinal,” about a caged cardinal that “sings, then dies of grief.” Human complications mirror shared conflicts of the birds, not just elusive beauty. Kearney’s lyricism voices tragedies.

Blackbird poems, especially “Crow,” deliver the chill of superstition. This long poem traces moments in her mother’s abandonment of her at birth, with moments of dialogue with a newly-discovered sister. The extended analogy of crows adds a dimension of sorrow, both personal and historic, as a Scottish grandfather sings, “about the ‘twa corbies’ who feast / on a dead knight’s bonny-blue eyes.” At the end, in a deathbed scene of her mother, attending nuns become crows, “Round and round my first mother’s deathbed / flew the Sisters of Bristol, that murder / of crows.”

Birds intervene between natural and human realms, and both take on elements of the other. This is a complicated and beautiful book. It now sits between my Peterson’s Field Guide to the Birds and Sibley Guide to the Birds. I treasure anthologies of bird poems, like The Poet’s Guide to the Birds, edited by Judith Kitchen and Ted Kooser (Anhinga Press, 2008) and Bright Wings: An Illustrated Anthology of Poems About Birds, edited by Billy Collins (Columbia University Press, 2012). Kearney’s poems are among the best, and the depth of her book keeps pulling me back.