The Flit and Perch of a feather
of a feather, Thaddeus Holownia & Harry Thurston. Anchorage Press, 2024.
The epigraph — that flitting telegraph of gravitas to come — that launches of a feather is an Emily Dickinson line: “‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers —.” A startling flutter of a phrase, though solemn of mien. This apparitional suddenness of Dickinson’s language (— sharp, emphatic intakes and asides rivened by em-dashes and irregular capitalisations) is a quality of birds too. Famously darting and flickering, spectral in colour and frame rate, holographic and mimetic, birds flirt the realms. We become, in their presences, watchers sighting. Lucky to catch sight of.
Thurston, too, is a lucky sighter, and takes textually up this avian mode of flit undercut with gravity. Scrubbed of any grandiloquence, these poems run the wren in their size and length. But in meaning, perch raptorish; weighty. Their subjects (each poem heralds an individual bird) are sounded with solemnity and acuity. These are profiles; tender limns; sketches. Exposés. Odes. Poems oriented portrait, not landscape, with each avian subject afforded personhood and frequently addressed as “you.”
More than mere fortunate witness, Thurston stands in special relation to these animals, putting questions to them, imploring them, making declaratives about their varied existences and observing their becomings. ‘‘‘Common’ they used to call you / and I do see you often / in the backyard, head down,” is the special familiarity with which he opens “Northern Flicker Colaptes auratus.” In “Blue Jay Cyanocitta cristata,” Thurston addresses the Jay directly, noting its ventriloquist abilities: “come fall, you return, / casting voices, your own / and others you mimic.” The high sensorial is alive in these stanzas. As, again, are the spectral qualia of birds and of poems. Of poiesis. Of hope.
These compositions are twinned with full-page colour photographs, shot by artist and teacher Thaddeus Holownia (of a feather is the third in a triad of collaborative books between Thurston and Holownia). Each image depicts the breast feathers of the bird in a close-up, bled-edged, cropped shot of study skins prepared “with love and respect” by Holownia’s late partner, Gay Hansen, a university lecturer and lab instructor, and the person to whom this volume is dedicated.
These synecdochic portraits are extraordinarily still, countering the restlessness and alighting spirit of the texts. The macro visuals become lush, hushed pastorals, gentling the poems from meditations on a singular bird to studies of the expansive landscape of “birdness.” Where the poems are embodied moments, the photographs are diffuse — they splay impressively, patterning and rustling at the edges of their pages, suggesting the wholeness of a bird ruffling just beyond the bounds of the frame.
Together, these images and writings describe the Aves, a class of beings that move through dimensionality in a novel way, who access the vertical axis, as here does Thurston, both in concrete poetic form (many poems take the shape of long columns) and in ascendancy of language. The tone is awed, yet the content meaningfully gyres the pragmatic, describing and heeding the wild dual existence of birds — as both animals labouring to glean nests out of gordian natural environments, and as aesthetes; as displayers of dazzling and precious plumages (“you become a blaze of light, / a yellow-shafted phoenix / rekindling the day’s ashes and dross.”).
The salve of avian beauty is perfectly articulated in “Red-Tailed Hawk Buteo jamaicensis”:
You came with the snows,
tail aglow, an ember
in the cold hearth of winter
......................................
On those meager days, we shared
twin desires, for warmth and living
motion to feed our eye-hunger.
It is, overwhelmingly, the privilege of our hearing and vision to perceive birds. The twin provinces also of poetry.
As a species, birds are ancient. Their own powers of observation and communication run millennia, and they are vaunted for this in these texts. Their especial mantle — feathers — arose early, though not as a result of an appetite or capacity for flight. Originally, feathers were adapted as scales and insulators; as swaddling and armouring elements. Later — much later — 80 million years later — they morphed into instruments of flight.
Is this the element of hope, recognized by Dickinson, that Thurston and Holownia also seek? A kind of long, purposeful biding? Yearn, with its conviction and patience of 80 million years?
We take from birds — these plumed vertebrates — so much: quills, down, meat; song. Language, possibly. The word “pen” is derived from the Latin penna — feather. Plume, in French, means also feather, or pen. If these meanings are truly interchangeable, are poems then possibly the integumentary system of lived experience? Are they the calibrators, the takers of readings of human experience? Do they insulate, communicate, protect — take us elevating up?
Ranging in shape, each poem’s structure in of a feather serves differently aspects of a common pursuit; is calibrated to the containering demands of the sketched subject. Some poems roll, some pitch, some yaw. Some display (“you deploy a carnival / of feathers fanning out — / a burlesque”). Others muffle and soar in the firmaments of the sensory; of the sensual. “[T]he tin sound of an overflying Cessna / ruins your air,” writes Thurston in “Northern Harrier Circus hudsonius,” affording the harrier primacy in the domain of the vertical. And these poems renew that deference again and again — bird as celestial doyenne, human as sky interloper. “Owl is presence, / bulk in the branches, / presiding in your parliament of trees,” begins “Great Horned Owl Bubo virginianus,” the poem quietly roosting with a power that gathers through its single stanza, concluding:
You wait out the daylight hours,
await the night — for flight,
to imprint your feathers
in the snow, parcel
a perfect bundle of bones.
This owl pellet reference as the poem closes is itself a kind of silent pounce — a peripheral reminder of the muscular nature of birds, and a sleeve tug of the suggestive and expansive nature of literature.
Another owl poem, “Snowy Owl Bubo scandiacus,” stoops and pounces too:
Lean years, the Arctic comes near,
irrupts south to this treeless plain
as if it were at home
in the unbroken whiteness.
Essence of essences, Thompson says,
but under that stark purity
lurks the terrible talons,
hardly an afterthought
but the lethal point —
imitations of eternal life.
Facing this poem is the only photograph to include anything but feathers, wherein the owl’s glossy talons act as visual tocsin in a downy landscape — a vertical garden of white breast feathers. Thurston is careful not to make elegiac a notion of whiteness here though, stating “as if” of unbroken whiteness as home, and speaking of this downy lamellar as “stark purity” harbouring “terrible talons.” Here, I cannot help but think of the expanse of page surrounding these poems — the large margins, the generous footing, and how this informs the keening and kerning words and font. Words as terrible talons? As clutching instruments seeking to grasp meaning of a fleeting thing?
Softness and claw in one. True of birds, as of much. Eloquent soar and clumsy grounding. Is this the essence of a bird? Of a poem?
What is it to be a thing with feathers? To embody featheredness; to write the avian? How is hope nidified within the armature of the Aves; within the hollow-boned pulsing of actual flighting things?
These poems, sistered with images, are responses unto themselves: works that honour the uniqueness of birds as well as the universality of their gestural language, familial lives, and desires.
But the quiet flocking velocity of this book is its capacity to make space for contemplations regarding the interior life of the other. To sonder; to reckon. With umwelts, bird’s-eye-views, ultraviolet lenses.
With nonhumanness.
More-than-humanness.
Birdness.
— Colleen Coco Collins is here for the birds, and living in rural Mi’kma’ki/ Nova Scotia for songs/poems/sea/sky/beats/trees . . .
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