The Names of Birds Stahlecker Selections Daniel Wolff 9781935536529 Books
Download As PDF : The Names of Birds Stahlecker Selections Daniel Wolff 9781935536529 Books
A field guide to perception, The Name of Birds is about how we see the “natural world.” That is, how we approach what isn’t us and name what we see. It also offers detailed observations of common North American birds.
The Names of Birds Stahlecker Selections Daniel Wolff 9781935536529 Books
I imagine most poets resist the tendency to compare their work to music, but I'm a music writer, and birds make song, so I'm going to say it....This may be my favorite album all year. (Album, after all, comes from a booked anthology, but I do mean to draw the music parallels.) Like one of the CDs always sliding around the floor of my car (or an 8-Track in my original driving days), this book has been with me nonstop for about six straight months. I've read it more times than I can count, and I'm not done with it. I've turned to it when my family faced sickness and death, and I've turned to it when my heart was all but lost. It's nourishing, but it offers no easy answers. It simply offers the music of words, and the lure of the very notion of promise.It starts by raising that question: why bother? In a Walker Percy quotation, a boy wonders the name of a bird, but the writer questions his aim. Wolff follows that question through four seasons consisting of nearly fifty poems. On one level, it's a struggle to make sense of the relationship between man and nature. This involves thwarted deductions, inductions and outright goofs. But his modus operandi is to keep on trying--speculating, interacting and being scrupulously honest about the illusions he indulges. While the speaker in these poems is generally clambering around riverbanks and, at one point, the roof of a fallen tree, a love story lurks in his heart--a story that begins somewhere close to Emily Dickinson wry humor and finds itself at the brink of Poe-like despair. Still, Wolff's raven is no more ominous than a purple finch, and humor salts the loss here, making it all the more real.
This is a beautiful book, about what we know (very little) and what we don't (on the order of multiple universes). It's about being real about acts of imagination, art as imitation and the truth to be found in lies. The moment that sums it up for me comes in "Herring Gull," a moment listening to a bird crying "At the very top story of the night....at the edge of what works." Like a Stax vocalist from the golden age of soul, singing just above his or her register, Wolff keeps his reach at or beyond the very fingertips of control. In doing so, again and again and again, he hands me something hard-earned, something I'm not expected to believe but with which I'm invited to play along.
Yes, there's the crisp clarity of the writing, and, yes, there's the inviting music of the verse, but more than anything, I hang in because I appreciate that reach. It's the best reminder I've found in a long while of the value of art, if not life.
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The Names of Birds Stahlecker Selections Daniel Wolff 9781935536529 Books Reviews
It's true that writing about poems is the surest way to deaden them. So I'm hesitate to offer any opinion about Daniel Wolff's marvelous suite called The Names of Birds. But I persist because the speaker of Wolff's poems is equally troubled about writing about birds, about rendering them into wordy images, about presuming to understand their behavior and songs, about humanizing them and relating them to our own fragmented lives. At times, these poems remind me of Wallace Stevens at his most quizzical. But while Stevens posited 13 ways of looking at a blackbird, Wolff can tease out the same tensions, unfolding contradictions and beauty from one fleeting glimpse or the excited trill of one snatch of song as it collides in the mind with the distress calls of a distant siren. Like the birds themselves, these poems are lyrical, sexy, funny and at times as opaque as a koan, existing beyond the meaning that we might feel compelled to impose upon them.
Amazing! I would recommend this book to anyone (and I'm not much of a poetry person)
Some of the best poetry I've read
There is very little poetry I find to admire these days, but this book was so accessible and at the same time breath-catching that I may go back and see if there are others as good out there. Hard to imagine.
I imagine most poets resist the tendency to compare their work to music, but I'm a music writer, and birds make song, so I'm going to say it....This may be my favorite album all year. (Album, after all, comes from a booked anthology, but I do mean to draw the music parallels.) Like one of the CDs always sliding around the floor of my car (or an 8-Track in my original driving days), this book has been with me nonstop for about six straight months. I've read it more times than I can count, and I'm not done with it. I've turned to it when my family faced sickness and death, and I've turned to it when my heart was all but lost. It's nourishing, but it offers no easy answers. It simply offers the music of words, and the lure of the very notion of promise.
It starts by raising that question why bother? In a Walker Percy quotation, a boy wonders the name of a bird, but the writer questions his aim. Wolff follows that question through four seasons consisting of nearly fifty poems. On one level, it's a struggle to make sense of the relationship between man and nature. This involves thwarted deductions, inductions and outright goofs. But his modus operandi is to keep on trying--speculating, interacting and being scrupulously honest about the illusions he indulges. While the speaker in these poems is generally clambering around riverbanks and, at one point, the roof of a fallen tree, a love story lurks in his heart--a story that begins somewhere close to Emily Dickinson wry humor and finds itself at the brink of Poe-like despair. Still, Wolff's raven is no more ominous than a purple finch, and humor salts the loss here, making it all the more real.
This is a beautiful book, about what we know (very little) and what we don't (on the order of multiple universes). It's about being real about acts of imagination, art as imitation and the truth to be found in lies. The moment that sums it up for me comes in "Herring Gull," a moment listening to a bird crying "At the very top story of the night....at the edge of what works." Like a Stax vocalist from the golden age of soul, singing just above his or her register, Wolff keeps his reach at or beyond the very fingertips of control. In doing so, again and again and again, he hands me something hard-earned, something I'm not expected to believe but with which I'm invited to play along.
Yes, there's the crisp clarity of the writing, and, yes, there's the inviting music of the verse, but more than anything, I hang in because I appreciate that reach. It's the best reminder I've found in a long while of the value of art, if not life.
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