The Bones of Winter Birds by Ann Fisher-Wirth
Terrapin Books, 2019
Our loved ones die abruptly as my granddaughter in that auto accident, or as my ex-husband by suicide, or as Max in that brutal linger we characterize as “not the way I want to go.” But they are dead, and not everyone has a gift of luminosity with which to memorialize them. Ann Fisher-Wirth has those luminous words. They are scattered throughout her work but condensed here in her new volume, The Bones of Winter Birds.
She has chosen Theodore Roethke’s line—“What falls away is always. And is near.”—to alert us that what we will be reading will be subdued but hopeful. They are gone—her first daughter, her father, her mother, her sister—but she remembers and can sing them in a radiant voice that carries “the music that happens after the voice is shattered” as Wirth puts it in “Bacalao” from her 2005 book, Five Terraces.
This music appears in “Yahrzeit”:
I am burning a yahrzeit candle
for you, my stubborn, lonely
sister, on this first anniversary
of your death. For the rest
of my life, I will be wearing
your diamond ring…
The third section of the book, “For Joan,” contains poems about the death of the sister who taught young Ann her ABC’s, and to read, and set her on her path as a writer with the words, “Don’t worry, Annie… Someday you’ll write a book like Virginia Woolf.” The far-away sister, the now-lost sister, the sister with a secret, who, despite time, distance, and impeding death, Fisher-Wirth talks to on the phone, aware her sister may not be able to comprehend:
…all things will remain unsaid.
But I am talking to you now, my sweet
sister, I don’t want to stop talking to you,
My thoughts keep time with your breathing.
After her sister’s death, she sings “A Lacuna”:
I can love my sister without ever
really knowing her, the time
for knowing my sister passed long ago.
And she also addresses her in “Sister”:
Gentle sister, sweet sister, I say this now to her memory—
just Gentle sister, sweet sister—
But this is only one short section of a book in which a subtle good humor works beneath the sober surface. Its first poem, “October, A Gigan: ”The seer…zipped up in a too-tight velvet costume” alerts us to what may be coming, for example, in “Haecceitas,” where a tomato takes the place of Christopher Smart’s cat, and later in “Everything Here Looks Very Dismal,” “…but if there were rabbits.” And again, where she has made a poem about a failed garden as a Golden Shovel. In a poem about the loss of a baby, she draws a harrumph-ing professor, whose lecture suggests “sex is enervating” to a “room full of virgins or putative virgins.” And the poet agrees, “sex gave [her] lots of energy.” Thus, the reader, who might be overcome by her own sadness in and of the world-as-it-is, may smile.
Hope is twinned with sadness throughout The Bones of Winter Birds from the beginning poem, which ends:
Breathe, and remember the fine-tipped leaves,
the quiet October air. Then it will come, the new.
In “Liege, the Barges,” optimism persists where, despite the dirt and foul weather, families who work the river have their comforts: “Still, beneath quilts, they are warm on barges.”Optimism also persists in “Sunlight, Sunlight,” where “sunlight stroking the birds’ throats… comes out as song.” The tone of this book is somber, I have to admit it. It is the story of a life, and lives being lived are often sad.
The craft and intelligence of this book come through in “Minas’ Daughter,” the poet, one of three sisters, writes about the three daughters of King Minas, two of whom resisted Dionysus and were turned to bats, “juddering. Squeaking in the twilight gloom.”The poem is set against itself in couplets, alternating the story of the Greek sisters and of the poet who has “done enough damage with desire for one lifetime” and longs “for ecstasy, but only partly / I love quiet and to work.”The god will turn the two sisters who refuse him, but meanwhile, “till night comes Minas’ stubborn daughters will be weaving,” and, one assumes, the poet will be writing.
Overall, The Bones of Winter Birds is a wonder, providing as it does sadness entwined with humor and hope, reminding us in “Nearly April” that “sap-rife glory does not stop for grief.”
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Wendy Taylor Carlisle lives and writes in the Arkansas Ozarks. She is the author of five chapbooks and four books. In 2019, she published both The Mercy of Traffic and On the Way to the Promised Land Zoo.