BIRDBRAINS: A LYRICAL GUIDE TO WASHINGTON STATE BIRDS

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BIRDBRAINS: A LYRICAL GUIDE TO WASHINGTON STATE BIRDS, ed. Susan Rich. Raven Chronicles Press, 2025.

I have two poems in this lovely book, lovingly curated by Susan Rich, assisted by bird note author Stephanie Delaney and artist Hiroko Seki. The poems are narrative and lyrical, longish and very short. The poets include Martha Silano, Jayne Marek, Kevin Craft, Joannie Stangeland, Sandra Yannone, Ted Kooser, Carolyn Forché, Mary Ellen Talley, Susan Landgraf—and so many others I’ve written about in these pages. You simply have to see for yourself.

Here is one of my poems:

Golden Diva

No bigger than a puff
of dandelion fluff, round bobbin
on a bare twig, breast
of muted light, gold-daubed head,
beak and feet tucked tight,
wings wrapped against wind.

Reflected in a puddle, up-
side down, crowned
by cumulous clouds, imbiber
of dew and seeds, tiny diva,
rouged beauty hopping branch
to water, and back.

—Bethany Reid, from Birdbrains (p. 241)

Tomorrow evening (Monday, April 27, 6 p.m.), I’ll be joining several other Birdbrains contributors to read at Everett Poetry Night (The Sisters Restaurant, Grand Avenue, Everett).

P.S. This morning I came across this post from Maria Popova at The Marginalian: “The Bird that Is Your Life.” Maybe you need to read it, too.

Caitlin Dwyer, IN THE SALT

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IN THE SALT, Caitlin Dwyer, MoonPath Press, 2026.

Winner of the 2025 Sally Albiso Award

How much more praise can I lavish on this quirky, brilliant collection of poems? The book is woven of two main strands: the female characters of Homer’s Odyssey, and the story of the birth and imperiled early life of Dwyer’s son, Quinn, to whom the book is dedicated. The book is woven of dreams, myths, nightmares, and hope. In a way the book is about weaving, and it is Penelope working at her loom that makes this theme clear. She weaves cloth (unweaving it each night, if you’re unfamiliar), as she fends off suitors, longs for her husband’s return, and watches her son grow up.

Strategies I found effective in making the whole coherent were Penelope’s dream sequences of untitled poems; and the several poems titled “Waste Thread” that are scattered throughout, like wasted threads on the floor under a loom. Some of these are short as two lines, but here’s a longer example:

Waste Thread

Silver-tipped rhododendrons.
Lichen-speckled bark.
I close my eyes and dream of rain, wake
and dream of rain. My eyes blur
when I try to focus. When I gaze out
of my eyes and not my head, I feel alive.
Nose in the wet soil. Songs of worm-trace
and limestone, shell-break, calcium pulver.
Phlox in the cracks. I close my eyes
and sugar-syrup coats my tongue, crystallized
honey cracked against a bad tooth.

—Caitlin Dwyer

Sometimes (often) the lines blur. Is this Penelope, wasting threads, or is this our poet?

Waste Thread

Buddha says we are all capable of waking up.
The human mind is nothing but sky-flowers.
Cataracts, clouds. Perhaps because I value the body
that made him, I cannot see my son clearly;
he dashes this way and that, wet petals, blur.

—Caitlin Dwyer

The final poem, “Song to Call a Body from the Salt,” begins—

Do you recognize the constellations yet?
The bear, the cored apple, the crab? The mother
with her hands full of stars

—and what I notice here is not only the lovely enjambment of the second line into the third, but also an education in progress. A mother, teaching her son about the constellations; a mother, learning to be present with your young son; and the poet, schooling us on her art.

Visit Dwyer’s website to find more poems from the book (including “Changeling,” one of my favorites). You can order a copy from MoonPath Press, or your local independent bookshop.

Maya C. Popa, WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER

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WOUND IS THE ORIGIN OF WONDER, Maya C. Popa, Norton, 2023.

In the opening poem in this collection, “Dear Life,” Popa writes, “I can’t undo all I have done to myself / what I have let an appetite for love to do me.” These lines set the tone for a book that again and again catches us on its barbed hook. Language hooks us. Ghost crabs are a “speculation on shape,” water, “an artifact of loneliness.” Can I capture the essence of this book after only one reading? Probably not.

Wound Is the Origin of Wonder

The bee that worshiped the mouths of those flowers
dropped to your window like a spent priest,
its thud comedic in the coded silence.
You were making a change to the order of your hours,
had announced as much in the prior moment,
and if I thought of Virgil’s Georgics, it was only
not to mention them. I brought up my eye
to its abdomen, offered an ounce of my human life.
What would you do with the knowledge
that I’d grieve for a bee? Someone like me
could be played by the threat of endings.
I’ll lose you one day, have lost you always,
a long ongoing Westwardness of thought.
It’s not metaphor that bees make honey
of themselves while language only dreams
the hunted thing. Let’s be hungry a little
while longer. Let’s not hurt each other if we can.

—Maya C. Popa (p. 32)

Toward the end of the book, toward the end of a long poem, “Pestilence,” Popa writes: “Each day I remember /
Each day I strategically forgot,” and “how human     is the future / will it let us let / I am listening through my terror for yours…”

Olawaseum Olayiwola in The Guardian described Wound Is the Origin of Wonder as “purposefully heart-decelerating.” It balances contemplation with a sense of walking through the natural world, balances woundedness with a deep, profound healing. I’m wholly intrigued.

Learn (much) more by visiting Popa’s website or Poetry Foundation.

 

Pádraig Ó Tuama, KITCHEN HYMNS

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KITCHEN HYMNS, Pádraig Ó Tuama, Copper Canyon Press, 2024.

I am going to cheat and just give you a few notes, then send you to other, smarter reviewers. You might begin with the first paragraph from Mary Grace Mangano’s review at Jesuit Media Lab, which elegantly makes Ó Tuama kin with Flannery O’Connor. Both raised Catholic. Both wrestling like Jacob with God.

Another bonus with this particular poet is that he and his Irish brogue host On Being’s Poetry Unbound.

If you search the Internet, you will find multiple recordings of Ó Tuama reading aloud from Kitchen Hymns. Another bonus.

Some of these poems are love poems, some are conversations. Some are blessings. As you settle into the collection, you find Persephone greeting Jesus in hell. Ó Tuama’s sexual poems are both blessings and rites of passage. I wonder if the tradition of metaphysical poet John Donne might be evoked here: “Batter my heart three-person’d God.”

What else can I say about a book that includes this line—

One way or another, shame
can teach you what nothing else can teach you.

(from “Rite of Baptism,” p. 82)

I spent a few hours reading and rereading Kitchen Hymns, but I have a feeling it’s a book that will have to be mulled over—for months or years.

Here is the final poem in the book, which, by the way, has lovely symmetry with the opening poem.

[untitled / missæ]

I bless myself in the name
of the deer and ox,
the heron and the hare,
evangelists of land and wood
and air. The fox as well, that red
predator of chickens, prey of cars.
And salmon and the trout
sleeping the reeds.
When the wren wakes, I’ll ask
her blessing, and if she comes out
she’ll bring it. The squirrel buries
when she thinks no one else can
see. I bless myself in her secrecy.
There’s a fieldmouse I’ve seen
scampering at dusk, picking up the seeds
dropped by the finches and the tits
throughout the day. Some nest of frenzy
waits her kindness and her pluck.
I go in the name of all of them,
their chaos and their industry,
their replacements, their population,
their forgettable ways, their untame natures,
their ignorance of why,
or how, or who.

— Pádraig Ó Tuama

If you are new to Ó Tuama’s work, his mission, here’s a link to On Being, and Krista Tippett’s 2022 interview with him.