Microreview: Corvus: A Life with Birds
July 1st, 2009 Posted in Sam | No Comments »
Corvus: A Life with Birds
Esther Woolfson
Counterpoint, 2009
“Familiarity doesn’t dull me to the wonder of birds,” writes Esther Woolfson at one point in her beguiling book Corvus, which mainly concerns the rook she takes into her home and names Chicken:
No Retreat, No Surrender hd …what they are and what they do. Chicken becomes more mysterious, more miraculous the more I learn, the more I observe. I spread her wings in my hand. She grunts and, briefly, objects. Before she tugs it back under her own control, I look at the lovely arc of it; feel the fine bones under my fingers, feathers all in their symmetrical and asymmetrical orders.
There are other birds than Chicken in this avian memoir – there are starlings and parrots and magpies, all taken into Woolfson’s home for varying lengths of time, all watched with her lively curiosity and observed (and often sketched – the book is delightfully illustrated) in intimate detail, by a bird-enthusiast so ardent she feels only sympathy even for the much-maligned Lord Byron when she reads a passage in his journal where he laments that “some fool” trod on his pet crow’s foot. “I salute the man,” she says. “I am unmoved by Lady Caroline Lamb’s famously designation of him, because nothing can alter the fact that it speaks well of a man when he cares about his pet crow’s toe.”
In Corvus
, Counterpoint has published a book sure to become a classic of the bird-book genre, something to put on the same shelf as Owl
by William Service or That Quail Robert by Margaret Stanger, and the reason is the same: like those authors, Woolfson has done more than simply take a bird into her home – she’s paid scrupulous attention to the person her guest quickly becomes, and she’s done it in graceful, affecting prose: “On a late-November afternoon, I see a hawk flying against a cold, silvered sky, the half flap, half smooth glide, the silhouette that can reduce a safe, protected indoor bird to shrieking terror.”
150 Cartoon Classic [Popeye Vol. 8] psp
Bird aficionados won’t want to miss Corvus, but it has a much greater appeal than that. Anybody who’s ever shared their life with another species will find a wonderful, insightful sympathy in these pages, a book to recommend and pass along.
–Honoria St. Cyr King Kong vs. Godzilla psp