Elyse Fenton admires two avian-inclined poetry collections

In a recent conversation, another poet told me, almost conspiratorially, that she was tired of bird poems. You know the type, she said. The hawk poem, the sparrow poem. I nodded vaguely, pretty sure she wasn’t talking about, say, Olson's 'The Kingfishers'. To be fair, she had just moved from rural life to a city, and was looking forward to readings that were not comprised of woodsy sestagenarian men trotting out earnest poems about raptors. What she meant, I think, were poems in search of a singular, decidedly unplayful form of awe.
    Don't get me wrong: I'm not knocking bird poems, or awe, for that matter. Indeed, I've written me own share of raptor poems. Good thing, too, since the two poetry collections waiting on my desk to be reviewed were, at first glance, full of birds.
    That said, the poems in Gwyneth Lewis' Sparrow Tree and Kelly Grovier's The Sleepwalkers at Sea are plenty playful, and are really 'bird poems' in title only. These are both collections that turn often to ars poetica, that deal in absence and elegy, that navigate gathering darknesses and ungathered selves, and, yes, that traffic, at least imagistically, in birds. Of the two, Grovier's collection is the less avian-inclined, and it still boasts the poems 'Hummingbird', 'Wren', 'Bird in the Air Pump', 'Kingfisher' and 'Murmuration' (Lewis has a poem of the same name), in addition to 'Wan Hu's Flying Chair' and 'A Butterfly in the British Museum'. In short, there are enough wings to go around.
    Why so many birds? The fact that there's a long tradition, that Keatsian longing is deeply alive in the poetic tradition, and it's hard not to enact odic or elegiac gestures without recalling, on some level, his nightingale, perhaps only underscores the question. Why, still, the birds?
    Honestly, I'm not sure, but I can say that the question at least recedes upon careful reading. What is compelling is the awareness of birds as ready figurative fodder that Lewis, and to a lesser degree, Grovier, bring to their work. Moreover, they approach their imagistic obsessions both with a sense of play and with a knowing nod to the perils of such play.
    Birds are equipped, after all, with beaks, talons and wings, They embody song and flight, there are sharpened talons and the potential Icarus-plummet to the earth. There these poems - forgive me - soar, are the moments that reckon with the understanding that transcending the body or the divided self requires a disruption, an act of violence. And where there is violence, there is tenderness, there is music.

(...)

The poems in Kelly Grovier's second collection, The Sleepwalkers at Sea, tread more lightly and less corporeally in their attempted invocation of the dead. These are quiet poems, full - arguably, to a fault - of mirrors, tokens, windows and keys, the evidence of invisible or thwarted crossings. While peering yearningly into mirrors, trailing through muddy fields and searching trains, museums and book pages for evidence, the speaker shifts between observer and mouthpiece for the dead, doubly unable to enact any alchemy to bring them back. It's in the recognition of this futility that Grovier's lyrics bloom.
    The early poem 'Watermarks' begins with the speaker's unearthly observation of the dead at work burying books. 'From my window I can see their silhouette/ swinging picks, heeling spades.' Yet, in reading the unearthed books, the speaker at once is denied his own authorship, and is killed off in a sensuous moment of violence, joining the ranks of the dead in technicality but no spirit.

As I slip away
the loosening knot, braille the faint
nib and pinch of words I might have written

had the fevers and the shaking stopped,
a sharpness snags my pulse, like lips
of a lost lover, or a razor, unzipping your wrist.

Though the poem could do without the predictable alliteration surrounding the lover's lips, the music that rises from the combination of internal rhyme and the repetition of (sleepwalker-appropriate) 's' sounds, lulls us up to the final moment of violence.
    As the image undoes itself, the spell is broken and the speaker, mercilessly, is brought back the world.
    Other moments of breakthrough violence have varying success. Take these keenly measured lines from 'The Thread',

The button with its four holes,
like a curious birthmark
you can push a needle through
without screaming.

    The image is astonishing, particularly in its second-person implication of the reader in an act tantamount to torture, but elsewhere, the poem devolves into self-consciously poetic diction ('the dark/ philosophy of trees'), and a kind of audible, disavowing shrug ('there may not have been/ a button') that leaves me yearning for the lyric space of figuration and not the more staid revelation of an ars poetica.
    Here, I guess, is the thing: you don't necessarily have to love the work of the ars poetica to appreciate the poems in The Sleepwalkers at Sea, but it helps. The gesture can feel strained at times, and a reader less inclined to embrace the self-conscious meta-lens might find it tiresome. That said, these are haunting, honed poems whose startling abruptions and imagistic flights are worth the price of the occasional overwrought symbol or telegraphed turn.
    I'll leave you with the flight of Grovier's gorgeous 'Murmuration'.

It rises in a bright shatter
of wings and lifts like a great
mind over the water's still
uncreasing canvas,
each feathered filing an end
of though. [...]