A Nature to Themselves: A Review of Studies of Familiar Birds

I suspect we each found different things upon which to lean as we muddled through the first year of the pandemic, and for me, poetry was not least among them. Carrie Green’s collection, Studies of Familiar Birds, stands out for me—despite the title highlighting creatures of flight—as an earthy, rooted work lives not solely on flight but also digs into the soil of the worlds without and within.

“One of the greatest blessings conferred on our lives by the Arts,” Auden wrote, “is that they are our chief means of breaking bread with the dead, and I think that, without communication with the dead, a fully human life is not possible.” Considering our present circumstances, in which we find ourselves continually rediscovering what it means to live a fully human life, forced to reinvent the act of breaking bread with the living when we cannot actually share the same bread, it is fitting that in Studies, Carrie Green invites us into those sacred voids left by loved ones, with her own memories alongside glimpses of a mother tenderly combing through the remnants of a lost daughter’s passion project as she continues it herself.

Studies of Familiar Birds by Carrie Green. Able Muse Press (2020). 92 pages. $19.95.

We are warned of what everyone touched by loss knows: “You will find it is not enough / to view the room as panorama.” What is left behind is necessarily too small a window, and yet we cannot help but strain to see through it:

Step inside
the room. Unlock cabinets

and open drawers to reveal
the ordered clutches of eggs—

thumb or palm-sized,
brown as a common hen’s

or creamy and swirled like marbles.
Blown out, insides washed clean.

Unstack the nests from shelves.
The newspaper packed within

crumbles at your touch.

The void created by a loved one’s death is hinted at by some small token that jogs a memory of how they once moved through the world, and through those found memories Green traces the trajectory of her own grief over the loss of her father as it tracks with that of Virginia Jones, a nineteenth-century mother whose daughter Genevieve died of typhoid, and who found a measure of solace continuing her daughter’s artistic work, choosing what tokens she could to fill the newly emptied spaces of her life.

In "Rattling the Afternoon," the first section of Studies, intimate images are stitched together to form a quilt of the small moments that give life to the memory of Green’s father:

These days,

he has little need for calling cards.
He chooses a white background,

removes his suit and pocket watch,
wanting to be captured without ornament,

as he really is. To help reveal your strong profile,
the photographer says

Those moments are paired with avian portraits to become something like templates, a looking up and out, a deep breath that gives new life to the process of building the nests that house our sorrow:

But mostly we adore
the rattle of wind through your wings,

and how, when dawn’s chatter
rises to cacophony,

we can always discern
your throat’s pulse.

Oh dove, the sweet ache
of your lament.

Teach us to sing
our grief.

In “The Ornithologist,” the middle group of poems, Green deconstructs Virginia’s journey as she continues her daughter’s project. “Portrait of Genevieve as a Young Woman'' explores how that process entwines the temporary spellbound reprieve offered by a cherished memory with the searing immediacy loss:

The photograph once pleased Virginia:
the way the light catches in Genevieve’s eyes
and burnishes her curls to amber,
how it blanches the stain of her rosacea
to marble

[...]

Now Virginia can’t look at the portrait
without imagining fog
creeping up her daughter’s chest and throat

Virginia met her daughter again and again as she worked, “a daughter who loved / to unpuzzle the tangles”, "an oriole perched / in Genevieve's chestnut hair," knowing all the while the truth in her efforts:

None of it enough

to comprehend

the palm-sized nest

or death.

Anyone who has experienced loss instinctively knows it already, but in these sharp inhalations Green’s poems put a spotlight on the harsh underlying reality of mourning: we pass through it because we must. The exhale comes when we realize that because we must, we would do well to accept the departed as companions.

In the final third of the collection, “Unfurl,” we begin to understand how memory and remnant combine as the life around us shares in our grief:

If not for the trees

beginning to pitch and moan
beneath our weight,
we could go on and on.

We wouldn’t want
to leave you.
We’d stretch and thin our caws

into silence. Above you,
our wings would beat the sky,
grief unfurling

like a shroud.

Memories old and new spill out as all creation groans with Green and with us, and the path her father’s body took sync with the natural progression of the world: “my father’s skin mottling like bruised fruit”—fruit that, in an earlier poem, was “easing past ripeness.” The way the world moves around us is a constant reminder that it literally cannot ever move exactly the same way again after someone leaves it, despite their assurances: “I'm at peace with it. / I am trying to tell you.”

In the end, I keep coming back to two lines in “Migration” that seem to serve as a fulcrum of the entire collection:

I couldn’t hear my breath.

*

I couldn’t hear his breath.

Our bodies, not just part of nature, are a nature unto themselves. One body slips into ultimate stillness as another body carries on despite itself. The air around us shudders with the beating of memory’s wings, and on our better days, we may even accept that we are sustained by the thrum, bird and father and mother and daughter alike.

And on the in-between days, we might as well ask the birds a favor:

You are the thing with feathers,

but I haven't made a habit
of you yet. Bird, be still,

just for a moment. Perch above me,
lurid yellow against the dark

face of the sunflower.
Let me get my fill.

Studies of Familiar Birds helped shepherd me through the dark winter months of a pandemic trudging toward its first birthday. Green’s poems gave flight to and grounded my spirit in ways I did not know I needed. It proved to be an evocative and necessary reminder that decay and death share a bed of leaves with everyday moments of natural beauty, and that memories of loved ones are at once ethereal and tied inextricably to the physical world they inhabited with us.