Bird Cloud (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: Bird Cloud Matt Low Bird Cloud. By Annie Proulx. New York: Scribner, 2011. 256 pages, $26.00. Annie Proulx’s new memoir, Bird Cloud, is about a house. To be exact, the house that she spent several years having built on 640 acres of former grazing land deeded to the Nature Conservancy in south-central Wyoming. Obvious analogs from Proulx’s oeuvre are her three collections of short stories set in Wyoming: Close Range (1999), Bad Dirt (2004), and Fine Just the Way It Is (2008). However, looking to her Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, The Shipping News (1993), might be more appropriate, as Quoyle’s doomed efforts to restore a family home in coastal Newfoundland discernibly foreshadow Proulx’s own frustrations to establish a sturdy human dwelling in a locale beset by the elements, especially the wind. The title of the book comes from the name Proulx bestowed upon the place after seeing a “cloud in the shape of an immense bird, the head and beak, the breast looming over the Rockies” as well as her hope that her new property would continue to serve as a sanctuary for golden and bald eagles, blue herons, and kestrels (48). Readers familiar with Proulx’s Wyoming fiction will no doubt come to the book expecting copious description of the physical environment in which Bird Cloud is situated. Proulx’s desire to build in this location stemmed from a similar attachment to the topography and ecology of the North Platte River valley; she writes, “Because place is such a major part of my writing life, I thought it important that Bird Cloud breathe in and out of the landscape” (50). Consequently, Proulx routinely leaves the construction of the house behind in order to traverse the bluffs, prairies, and waterways around Bird Cloud, often taking the construction crew along with her. The “deep map” that makes up much of the book’s second half recounts these excursions [End Page 208] and attempts to uncover the ecological and archaeological layers of the area, often with fascinating results. Yet Proulx occasionally comes across as unconcerned with examining her own complicity in the alteration of Bird Cloud’s ecology—such as when she removes dead wood from around her house in order to “reduce the number of porcupine dens” in the area—missing a chance to reflect critically upon US place-making in the New West (220). Bird Cloud also gives considerable space to the seemingly mundane choices Proulx had to make in the house’s design and her near daily struggles with contractors, architects, and builders. At times, these details feel like minutiae, but as Gaston Bachelard philosophizes in The Poetics of Space (1958), even the simplest houses transcend the construction materials, square footage, and building codes that constitute their physical realities. Articulating the “chief benefit of the house,” Bachelard proclaims that the house “shelters daydreaming, the house protects the dreamer, the house allows one to dream in peace” (6). Proulx’s aspirations to build such a house may fall short in the end, but the resulting memoir makes clear that her labors were not in vain. Matt Low University of Iowa, Iowa City Copyright © 2011 Western Literature Association