Barrelhouse Reviews: Studies of Familiar Birds, by Carrie Green

Review by Thomas E. Simmons

Able Muse Press / December 2020 / 92 pages

Adjectives which come to mind when reading Studies of Familiar Birds are “spare,” “disciplined,” and “restrained.” This is not to say that Carrie Green’s verses are unornamented. On the contrary, they boast a plumage rivaling those of the brilliant warm-blooded nesting beings which occupy her attentions. Indeed, the poems themselves flit and sing like birds.

For the most (and the best) part, Green does not study birds in this collection per se, but rather 19th century avian scene illustrations, which are as delicate and precise as her poems. Young Genevieve Jones was inspired by Audubon’s bird prints, and in 1879, she commenced a series of true scale egg/nest plates to accompany Audubon’s magnificent Birds of America (1827-38). When Genevieve died of typhoid at age 32, her mother, Virginia Jones, finished the project and titled it Illustrations of the nests and eggs of birds of Ohio (1886). The result was a series of formal, scientific, gorgeous works. Many of Green’s poems reference particular plates in the rare collection of the Jones mother/daughter paintings.

Other poems in Green’s collection trace their lineage to contemporary Canadian artist Sara Angelucci’s Aviary series of remade vintage photographs—carte-de-visite portraits of weird human/birdlike creatures. Featuring feathered faces, distant glances, wing-lapels and graceful beaks in formal poses, Angelucci’s creations are inscrutable and unnerving, blurring the animal and the human.

Other than the cover illustration of Green’s book, which is Jones’s Plate XXIV, the visual inspirations for Green’s poems must be sought elsewhere if the reader wishes to consider them alongside the poems. Such are the limitations of poem collections in the publishing world, in view of the prohibitory cost of reproducing color plates. But the reader without ready reference to the art which inspired the poems will not miss much. The poems stand on their own.

Many of Green’s ekphrasis poems mix in historical/biographical jots concerning Virginia Jones’s grief over her daughter’s passing. And one section—the third of three—intercuts the poet’s own grief upon the loss of her father.

So, what we have here is an economical set of bird, nest, and grief poems. Some are odes to particular fowl. In “Ode to the Mourning Dove,” the poet respectfully addresses the nest assemblages and the shape of an ordinary dove:  

… Please forgive us

 for finding your tiny heads
so comical above your plump,

delicious breasts. But how we covet
the blue rims lining your black eyes!

In other poems, Green’s eyes peer out from Virginia Jones’s skull, concentrating on the construction of a painting. The poet becomes the painter, or the painter transfigures herself into a wordsmith, working up a composition of text, as in “Kentucky Warbler”: 

As always, Virginia begins

with what’s before her:

the lining’s dark swirl

of rootlets and horse hair;

the rim of vines,

the foundation of dead leaves. 

What a fine description of the alchemy of both paint and verse. There is a shared concentration upon subject which underlies both, and Green deftly captures it.

The Angelucci-inspired poems, however, blend a sour note with the sweeter poems about nests and the songbirds who build them. A few of the Angelucci poems unsettle; they are odd and demoralized. There is a kind of horror in “Portrait of Ornithologist as Short-Eared Owl.” It is the disfigured mustard-colored eyes of a bird-human which trouble us the most:

… the human shape of his eyes suggests

they are neither pale yellow nor sulfur –
amber, perhaps, or olive drab.

If it were up to him, he would record the color
before plucking them from the specimen.

The contrast between a poem such as this one and another of the more prosaic attempts is startling. The plumage is out of place and simply wrong. This is an inhuman aesthetics, an aesthetics of beasts, but one assembled with beauty and paired with deep connections, especially at the intersection of grief and toil.

In still other poems, grief merges not with toil, but with feathers. In “Fever,” mother-artist and daughter-artist switch places and it is the mother Virginia who is shivering with an unnamed sickness, huddling beneath a quilt. Her ethereal daughter, meanwhile, enters as a girl-bird attending to her mother. This is a different kind of transposition:

And the girl learning over her –
a slender curving beak
interrupts her face.

and chestnut down blooms
like moss over her skin –
she is and isn’t Genevieve.

In a note, Green explains that following Genevieve’s death, her mother Virginia also contracted typhoid fever while completing her daughter’s artistic project. The bird-girl who “is and isn’t Genevieve” hovering over her mother is therefore a kind of ghost visiting her grieving parent; an animation of a lost child who at once is—and is not—that child.

 Green’s collection links with a spring 2020 release from Rose Metal Press, Audubon’s Sparrow – A Biography in Poems by Juditha Dowd. Dowd’s collection is a poetic epistolary concerning Lucy Bakewell Audubon (spouse of John James Audubon) and the disciplined courage she brought to a partnership through which her husband was able to pursue birds, paint them, and market the resulting lithographs. (Genevieve Jones is sometimes referred to as “the other Audubon.”)

Would that there were more poems in the world like Green’s. The stanzas are radiant, seeming capable of flight; unsentimental, yet stirring.  Upon finishing the last page of Studies of Familiar Birds, my conclusion was that we needed more poems about bird nests. A single speckled egg is as worthy of an ode as a deceased beloved.

Thomas E. Simmons is a lawyer and a professor at the University of South Dakota School of Law. He is the author of Tod Browning Loose-Leaf Encyclopedia (Cyberwit 2020). Learn more at thomasesimmons.com.