A bird’s eye view of feathered friends
In a remarkable book that combines eco-poetry, poetic prose and personal and scientific information by award-winning African-American ornithologist and professor at Clemson University, J. Drew Lanham, birds are the major focus, with Lanham even giving us a semi-humorous list of rules for birders.
“Sparrow Envy: Field Guide to Birds and Lesser Beast” (Hub City Writer’s Project, 104 pages), then, is a melange of sections, styles and subject matter. The largest section in this book is comprised of poems about birds: heron, woodcock, woodthrush, waxwings, warbler, grackles, peregrine, wren, gull, eagle and owl, to name but a few.
What’s remarkable about the poems is that Lanham has created a voice that is, in fact, musical, creating rhythms, even melodies, through a kind of alchemy of alliteration. It’s as if he’s trying to describe these various bird species by replicating their songs. Or as he says in the poem “Wood Thrush Id:” “It’s not so much about identifying what birds are, as feeling who birds are.”
In lines such as this line from a prose poem titled “Necessary Greed” we can get a lyrical sense of this voice: “The shadow bird, the olive-backed spiral song slinger; the Swainson’s thrush skulking haint-like in my sideyeard thicket for the past few days.” Lanham will also throw in an occasional rhyme scheme to add another dimension to his self-harmonizing sonatas as he refers to the bird songs he knows by heart. Lines and descriptions like these are often combined in his poems with words of wisdom—recollections or perceptions from personal experience and long days over the course of many years as a nature lover and a student of the birds. “If wildness is a wish then I’m rubbing the lamp hard for a million more wandering moments.” And: “All I witness is worthy of worship. Wild things are not burdened with guilt or sin.” Or in his poem “Deer Worship”: “Commandments don’t come in ten, but one — just be.”
One of the most entertaining poems in this collection is “Octoroon Warbler,” where Lanham renames some of his favorite birds according to their physical properties or personalities — remembering the identity of the birds for what they are. “The sea-going petrel with the artist’s moniker shall now be/’Warm-Sea Wanderer.’/An identity worthy of its tropic-trotting status.” In the piece titled “New Names for Plural Birds” he gives us “A Congress of crows/A Whir of hummingbirds/A Palette of painted buntings/A Tide of shorebirds/A Herd of cowbirds/A Privilege of all birds white—“
With compassion, intellect, creativity and musicality, Lanham narrows his focus down to simply his love of nature toward the end of the book in “Love For A Song.” “The surge, that overwhelming inexplicable thing in a swallow’s joyous flight or the dawning of new light that melds heart and head into sensual soul in that moment of truly seeing — that is love.” In that same section in the prose piece “In Rememberance,” this short sentiment and a fitting end-piece for his book:
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“At the end—to be loved and loving. That will be grand. Children chattering and grown to good. Woodlands walked and wandered. Surf sauntered through. Trees scaled to spy on the waking wood. Streaking stars hauling wishes through an ink black sky. A lingering embrace.”
(Thomas Crowe is a regular contributor to The Smoky Mountain News and author of the multi-award-winning non-fiction nature memoir“ Zoro’s Field: My Life in the Appalachian Woods.” His review of “Sparrow Envy” first appeared in Rain Taxi Review.)
