Wednesday, July 4, 2012

Quick Review

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Not at all my sort of anthology, this pretty little thing, but now I've bought it, haven't I? And why not? Fact is, it is awfully pretty just as an object, this little book: well-made, of a comfortable size and shape for poetry, and holding, nicely designed, and of course, aflutter with lovely Sibley birds, ain't it?

i am not a birder. I'll never have occasion, heaven knows, to consult the great book of the great painter of birds, David Allen Sibley. Doesn't mean I haven't thumbed those big volumes just to admire the pictures. (If you haven't, you should, whatever your interest if any in identifying this, that or the other, sorting one tit from another, so to say. Believe me, it's a pleasure just to be in the company of Sibley's birds.)

Next I must say, outside of Edward Lear's drawing, of Dore's Dante, I don't much like or feel the need of illustration for most poems and would generally do as well without in perhaps all but those two cases that come quickest to mind; in the first example because the pictures are always at least as much fun as the nonsense, and in the latter because whatever the translation, I really love Dore's somehow English Heaven and Hell. The idea of an anthology of bird poems isn't a bad one -- and for that matter this is not even the first such that I've owned -- but now i see this with the Sibley pictures, I appreciate how good a thing it is to have a coot by for consultation even as reads with admiration the travails and trials, "oh brave, adventurous coot," of Mary Howitt's poem here, poem and poet otherwise unknown to me, and actual coots, of the web-footed kind, nearly so as well. lots of poets here, and birds, I meet for the first time.

The editor, poet, Billy Collins, no doubt knows his business, and his fellows well, and that proves very good in a book that might otherwise have been kept to a rather crowded if uninterestingly familiar perch. Instead, even he oldest things here can be a bit surprising. There's certainly nothing shocking here, nothing very challenging or dense, but that is so clearly in keeping not only with the spirit of the enterprise, which is as much nature writing as poetry, and with the the selection of editor and illustrator, neither being know for either innovation or abstraction, but rather -- and again I say, a good ting here too -- for accuracy of detail, the characteristic according to type, and the facts forthrightly put. That would seem to me to be why the thing works.

Here then just enough of everything: verse, facts, birds, color, flight, fancy and rest. Perhaps the only thing actually missing might be song -- but then that would go too far. I hate books that actually chirp. better to leave the music to the poets.



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