Birds of America: Poems by Chera Hammons

 

Birds of America: Poems by Chera Hammons

The book begins witha poem on killdeer. If you are a birdwatcher, then you will understand the stories behind the birds, their calls, the place they call home that needs rebuilt every once in a while and sometimes overpowered - an owl's nest before that was actually a Cooper hawk's nest. In an Eponymous poem which follows the structure of

 "Before the catalog the art came... Before the art, the wire came.. Before the wire.."

You get the drift, nothing in nature stays the same, there is dark history of nature and Audubon.

"Our mistakes, buried in plastic bottles

                will abide much longer than our mourning" - Conservation List

"we dont know all that we are missing yet" "Every extinction has to start somewhere"

Humans role in coexisting with nature - "There would be no one to ruin anything or save it" and vice-a-versa in a curved bill thrasher's mischief.

The poems are not just observations of nature, but ironies of whom nature chooses.

"It matters how we are left" leads into erasure poetry which at once can be seen as found poetry too. You can feel that tension of human expectations in the migratory life between birth and death.

In search of meaning and hope, poet Hammons takes us down the path of finding it in nature.