Taking Flight
2015
Nancy Dew Taylor
Ninety-Six Press
Greenville, SC
$12.00
Reviewed by Clara B. Jones
The British have been obsessed with
birds since the early naturalists, funded by the landed gentry,
sailed to foreign lands and tropical habitats, returning with living
specimens and skins of feathered exotica. Such activities represented
exertion of human control over Nature, an ethic transported to the
New World by explorers. Birds have been highlighted by American poets
since the 18th century, though our country's most famous
poem about birds is recent, Wallace Stevens' “Thirteen Ways Of
Looking At A Blackbird.” One of this poem's stanzas is among my
favorites:
“I do not know which to prefer,
The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos,
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.”
Verse about birds and other animals is,
generally, romanticized or treated humorously, certainly as a means
of control by the poet but, also, as a way of distancing the writer
from the natural world. Emily Dickinson's, “Hope Is The Thing In
Feathers,” idealizes birds, while, Paul Laurence Dunbar's poem,
“Sympathy,” sentimentalizes them. Alicia Ostriker, a feminist
poet and critic, writes imagistically about birds (“Birdcall”),
but Robert Penn Warren presents them as heraldic (“Evening Hawk”).
American poets have, also, written about birds anthropomorphically
(Edgar Allen Poe's, “The Raven”) and humorously (Jack
Prelutsky's, “Last Night” and Gertrude Stein's, “Tender
Buttons”). Chickens, robins, and blackbirds seem to be common
species of interest.
South Carolina poet Nancy Dew Taylor's
birds are scientific subjects carefully observed in their historical
context by a scholar-poet. Her poems meet Percy Bysshe Shelley's
definition of Poetry as “that which comprehends all Science”
(1821). Taking Flight documents the extinction of many bird
taxa of the eastern United States, providing rich historical and
biological data, as well as biographical information about several
early naturalists, emphasizing the significance of Alexander Wilson
(1766-1813) to the study of Ornithology in this country. Taylor's
descriptions of Wilson portray a lonely, bullied, detached, arrogant,
driven man, unlucky in love, and (like John Keats) destined to die
young from tuberculosis. Taylor writes that Wilson...
“Captures a wounded ivorybill—
keeps it three days, draws it, watches
it die.”
and,
“Listens to put-downs,
excuses, to professors of natural
history who,
as he writes a friend, scarcely knew
a sparrow from a woodpecker.”
In addition to Wilson, Taylor presents
accounts of the lives and work of the 19th century
naturalists, Charles Willson Peale, John Abbott, Arthur T. Wayne, and
Martha Dartt Maxwell. It would be interesting to compare Maxwell's
biography and career with that of the 19th Century German
ornithologist, Amalie Dietrich, who traveled alone to Australia to
compile what some scientists consider to be the largest collection of
birds ever collected. Dietrich never published academic papers as far
as we know; however, a few German biologists based important
publications on Dietrich's efforts. Similarly, the ornithologist,
Robert Ridgeway, utilized Maxwell's bird trophies for his academic
studies, and, Taylor notes, “Robert Ridgway [made a catalog of] the
birds./He named a subspecies of eastern screech-owl/after her, a
first for any woman.”.
In addition to narrative poems, Taking
Flight includes poems written in experimental forms (pages 48 and
55, for example), and the “color” expressed in the writing
throughout the book is vivid and detailed, suggesting that Taylor is
appreciative of the visual arts. Remarkably, though this collection
mimics a scholarly monograph (that might have benefited from a
bibliography), the writing avoids a didactic quality, and one never
loses awareness of “pitch,” one of Helen Vendler's criteria for
poetry that has “good staying power.” Though Taylor's themes are
focused on the 19h century, her poems may achieve the
Romantic vision of literary work that is “true for all time”
(Paul Fry), and these gifts in verse should be read with historical
as well as artistic sensibilities. To quote Shelley, again, “The
poem is an invention that exists in spite of history. In a time of
violence, the task of poetry is in some way to reconcile us to our
world and to allow us a measure of tenderness and grace with which to
exist. Poetry's task is to reconcile us to the world.” Neither
Taylor's free forms nor her emotions overwhelm her narrative poems
which highlight her respect for the poetic craft by communicating a
story without sentimentality and without telling her audience what to
think or feel. In this manner, Taking Flight honors its
subject matter and its readers. This book is a treasure that deserves
a wide audience.
