Some Days the Bird by Heather Bourbeau and Anne Casey
I learn that hummingbirds do not form flocks
even when migrating. I stare at the blue-throated and Anna’s,
wonder if their solitude is to spare us
the pain of too much beauty gathered at once.
~ Congregation by Heather Bourbeau
Some Days the Bird (2022) is a meditative collection of poetry that reflects on pandemic years between two poets, Heather Bourbeau, based in California, and Anne Casey, based in Sydney. In an interview for The Irish Times, the two detail how they met by chance just before the global pandemic closed borders and how this led to a poetic back and forth spanning the globe. They alternated each week, taking turns to create 52 poems across 52 weeks.
The result is an ode to a sense of survival and the discovery of the things that fuel us when the world goes dark. Both poets seek refuge in their gardens and the changing seasons, and through this meditation on the natural world, they offer a startlingly wonderful reminder that life goes on.
Casey’s early poems in the collection take their titles from the baffling handling of the pandemic across Australia by politicians with ulterior motives, but the poems return to inward reflection and her personal feelings about each new announcement.
In Our Prime Minister Says the Vaccine is Not a Silver Bullet, she observes her summer garden, thinking of her father experiencing another season elsewhere, and hopes:
my heart rising to meet the updraughts,
torn between émigré anguish
and shimmering hope.
In turning to their gardens, there is an early sense of wanting to block out lingering global events but also of wanting to find some sense of order in a world turned upside down. Stowaway is a short but bittersweet piece by Bourbeau, detailing the discovery of an ant in her clothes after returning inside from the garden:
There is only so much outside I will let in.
The dirt under my nails. The echoes of fog in my hair.
In Solstice, Bourbeau asks:
What will we remember from this time?
This relentless distance.
Breath caught in mask.
Denials. Acceptances.
By focusing on the pandemic, it would be easy to get lost in prose reliant on too much introspection or doom and gloom, but that never becomes the case. Bourbeau and Casey remain vibrant observers of everything that is happening, filling the lines with beautiful descriptions of the plants, birds and insects that fill their days. They draw our attention to something many a writer, poet and artist before them has acknowledged: that nature is almost always the balm we need to find our footing.
It’s not just the pandemic that the poets seek refuge from in the natural world. Amidst extended lockdowns and vaccine mandates, Bourbeau and Casey observe the impacts of climate change across their respective changing seasons and changing selves. In The Minister for Bushfire Recovery is Reassigned to Floods, Casey details the devastation of floods in her community:
To our north, a wedding couple watch with
countless millions as their connubial
home drifts slowly down the swollen river,
as fifteen thousand neighbours are evacuated
from their coastal community, where we basked
in beachside sunshine only weeks ago.
Turning to the minutiae of their gardens amid isolation leads to both poets creating a stunning record of their internal and external worlds. Throughout the collection, they neither attempt to make sense of the chaos around them nor offer cliched sentiments for passing through it.
Instead, they invite us into their sumptuous observations of an ever-moving natural world, wild growth and moments of predictability and unpredictability: “Nasturtiums never planted sprout and spill”, while “the smaller bee prefers my aging lavender”, and “sunlight flaring between fistfuls of vigorous foliage.”
Threaded throughout are themes of feminism and ageing, resilience and grief - all connected to some parallel the poets discover in their gardens, often in subtle and surprising ways, pulling the reader to a realisation with a final lyrical line:
Before a skunk releases its scent it will
Stamp, snarl, spit, click its teeth, raise its tail.
So many warnings, for those who can read the signs.
From Relocations, by Heather Bourbeau
This was a well-crafted collection to read, and released at just the right time to reflect as a reader on these experiences without still feeling too ‘stuck in it all’. At a few points, I found myself reminded of Mary Oliver’s work. If Oliver had been alive, writing poetry through the pandemic, I suspect it would have been akin to Bourbeau and Casey’s thoughtful meditations.
Elaine Mead is a freelance writer and book reviewer, currently residing in nipaluna (Hobart), Tasmania. She is passionate about the ways we can use literature to learn from our experiences to become more authentic versions of ourselves and obsessed with showing you photos of her Dachshund puppy. You can find her online under www.wordswithelaine.com.
