Though it’s categorized as a collection of essays, one might, at first glance, mistake Conversations with Birds as a coffee-table book of whimsical shelf art. Wrapped in a selection of images from the famed paintings of John James Audubon, the book’s smooth exterior provides a stunning entryway into its pages of compelling and poetic prose.
The sun rode
like a dude:
He rode the sky—gold capes thrown
by clouds splayed
across his way
pole to pole, high shine smeared by a giant—
who roared:
and out poured
more gold for God! (even more gaudy than God)
Through a tight window, Julian
crouches over a bit of handwork.
Known for going nowhere
she has redefined the words home,
here, prison, exile. Your eye,
single, beholds her face. Her eye
never leaves her needle.
Unlike you, she knows where
she will die. She breathes eats
sleeps a seamless meditation.
“The ancient Greeks had lots of things that we still have today, like medicine and olives, and lots of things that have died out, like democracy and pillars,” Philomena Cunk (Diane Morgan) intones sagely, without a hint of irony. Cunk is the fictional host of the fictional history documentary Cunk on Earth (a joint BBC Two/Netflix production, streaming on Netflix), which promises to explain “how humanity transformed our planet” in five brief episodes that move from the emergence of Homo sapiens to the invention of the iPhone in less than three hours.
Peter Howson has been described as a modern-day Hieronymus Bosch for his detailed and disquieting depictions of the Gospel Passion narratives, like this graphite drawing on gessoed wood of the mocking of Christ. The Scotland-based artist first attracted notice in the 1980s in a group of trend-bucking figurative artists called the New Glasgow Boys, who exposed the seamy underside of modern Britain in mural-sized canvases of football rowdies running wild in the streets and expressionistic portraits of people on the social margins.
Madre della Consolazione by Nikolaos Tzafouris
Byzantine and Christian Museum, Athens
Opening with the proto-feminist Puritan poems of Anne Bradstreet (1612–1672) and closing with the reorienting poems of Joy Harjo of the Muskogee Nation (1951–), Chicago-born poet and literary critic Edward Hirsch serves us with new readings of 40 American poets. Drawing on his life of teaching and writing, Hirsch places the work of the poets in chronological order. A representative poem precedes informal and authoritative comments on each chosen poet.
After the winter, we long for an aromatic caress of mint,
for the sprig of new mint on a bathroom sill, the tingle
of the soft mint starlight over the blue mint of the sea—
drowned acres of blurred mint under the ocean waves,
watery yards of spearmint and winter mint and catmint,
butter mint and basil mint crushed and brewed in tea bags.
This is how we shall live from now on, days after the war,
grace-filled and simple as a populace without wheat bread
or the daily rations of butter and flour. We are a solo leaf
of a receding sun—star
-lings returning to roost.
Here, the night isn’t a cat
burglar carting away the light
in our bones. It is in fact
the warm warble of God
lulling us into the gentle
deep. The synapse of sinew
between the wing and the wind.
No one lightens the body
by torching the eyes.
Even the savior
surrounded by water
and waves still
made time for a pillow.
Friend, are you listening?
Peace, be still.
Morning will come,
On Panther Creek in the Sierra,
I saw a boulder splashed
with pale green crustose lichen,
merged and matted all across its granite sides,
just the way a sandstone boulder used to be
in a small ravine beside our home.
Then a wildfire poured itself
down that ravine, and the eucalyptus
dripped with flame,
scorching all that lovely lichen.
That was eight years ago,
and the sandstone boulder
shoulders only a ghostly palette,
little outlines of charcoal shadows.