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Birdwatching in Wartime

Carnegie Mellon University Press, 2009

Jeffrey Thomson’s award-winning fourth collection of poems, Birdwatching in Wartime, takes place around the globe, but finds its home in the rainforests of Costa Rica and Peru.  The diverse and complexly layered environments of the neotropics are the perfect setting for these poems – both linguistically and atmospherically.  Thomson explores the way questions of beauty, grief, and desire are filtered through particular landscapes and natural images, and along the way metaphor, memory, violence, and eros all combine to rewrite and alter the human experience of the natural world.  As his poems break apart the traditional Linnean categories of natural history and drive the wedge of human memory and desire into the gaps, Thomson ultimately reveals and revels in the fact that the narratives we bring into the world color and shape that world to such an extent that we cannot easily judge what is the world and what the story.

Praise for Birdwatching in Wartime

Thinking that becomes sensuous — Major Jackson

As the title suggests an eloquent tension runs through this book,both meditative and troubled, cultural and pastoral, as it shows us what it is to desire peace in the midst of unrest.  How else could Bugs Bunny and Yosemite Sam appear in the same poem as Orpheus and Eurydice? Few poets write with this much emotional and intellectual dexterity. But what I love most in these poems and in this poet is the insistent, lyrical intensity.  Whatever the subject, whatever the style these are songs belted against the violence and loss that permeate contemporary life. Lush, visceral, and expansive, Birdwatching in Wartime is Jeffrey Thomson’s best book yet. — Terrance Hayes

The words churn in Jeffrey Thomson’s imaginative poems. The impulse to catalog, to embrace through language, is given free reign in Birdwatching in Wartime.  The sheer appetite of these poems, their intellectual drive and rhythmic insistence, conveys an almost physical sense of the poet’s curiosity, a wonder that deepens, over the course of the book, to a conveyance of his love for the fullness of the natural world. — Bob Hicok

Jeffrey Thomson’s Birdwatching in Wartime gives us poems as amazing and lush as the rainforests they encounter.  And as crucial.  I don’t know what to praise more: the language that surprises and delights at every turn, the mind that handles complex feelings and concepts with utter clarity and grace, or the spirit that delicately probes those liminal places where tendril meets air, where what we can and cannot know seem to engender each other.  — Betsy Sholl

 

 

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