Helen's Poems

Pluvialis, who should be well- known to readers of this blog, may be better known to the world as Helen Macdonald, lecturer at Cambridge, falconer, author of this good book, and poet. I have been spending a lot of time with her poetry lately as an anecdote to some difficult work and to charge (recharge?) my batteries for a new big slightly scary project.

I wrote in a letter: "I have been immersing myself in the poems-- I find them both difficult and exhilarating. I sit with one for a while, fighting for larger meaning, and suddenly something comes into sharp focus like a wild bird in a thicket through binoculars."

Here is an example, one dedicated to the late falconer- naturalist Bill Girden:

Poem

for Bill Girden

Death, about which we are all thinking, death, I believe
is the only solution to this problem of how to be able to fly
--Paul Nash, Aerial Flowers, 1945

To state the discovery of a country
& be in a time without rage, keeping wings
nearyourself, as barred as buried in the day, crossly.
Some present results; a tree, a quail, a rock, a hawk
rousing one's mind from safety and tameable illness
to beautiful comprehension in the form of a hunch
as patience directs

the finishing line is a trail of feathers to brush.
You might resist the pall of earthly wings
wicker thrumming with sand and hysteria
no longer a word, no use, knocking at wind
or poise as it flows up along the face, an edge
clipped with rock and lifting, a movement

as if one were about to launch into speech of faith
at least a hoped conviction, spite of coincidence.
'This is hardly a flaw; it simply is' you say, then drop
like a lark in abeyance of song to mitigte sward.
My pen crumples into a swan, it is singing
inauthenticate myth, and not of future spendour

I am glad. some evidence of a hymn without light. Fracas.
History. The building of a condominium.
It is tru I had never met.
There was a strike on the glass; it was a bird.
I have never been to the desert.

And here is a bit of one more favorite, "Lammergeier", about the Bonebreaker, the great bearded vulture of the wastes of Eurasia:

Today is what either history truth maybe the civilisation of work
grandeur and its all allies spread upon the long steppe

blood on their faces from the setted sun & the formes of music
chased with woodsmoke the apparel the magenta turf

single beads and microhistories & the tracts all equally torn
above the lozenged tail of the pseudo-phoenix the lambslayer's

water and golden eye, his breast feathers rusted from long contact
with oxides and bone & his long remiges conformable with pure air...

Enough for now-- I hope these snippets have given you a taste. She has a book of poems published, Shaler's Fish, but it seems to be out of print despite its presence in English Amazon. If you find one, let me know!

Here is a review of Shaler's Fish-- scroll down. Some poems here and here. (I confess I find the second one baffling!) She is also the youngest poet included in the Oxford anthology of Twentieth-century British and Irish Poetry , a huge volume that starts with Hopkins and contains every canonical (Yeats, Auden, Hughes, Larkin) and also NON- canonical good poet you can think of-- !

I will add my International Falconer review of "Falcon" when the current issue is replaced by the next one .