Taking Flight, Nancy Dew Taylor (Review by Clara B. Jones, 2015)

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 18^th 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 19^th 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 19^th 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 19^h 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.