Reviewed by: All Morning the Crows by Meg Kearney Stephanie Rauschenbusch (bio) all morning the crows Meg Kearney The Word Works https://wordworksbooks.org/product/all-morning-the-crows/#:~:text=Meg%20Kearney%20draws%20on%20her,exploration%2C%20discovery%2C%20and%20reconciliation. 101 pages; Print, $18.00 Meg Kearney gives much credit to Diana Wells, whose book 100 Birds and How They Got Their Names, published by Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill in 2002, guided her toward many of the poems in this wonderful book. There are two kinds of poems in her book—poems about birds, and poems about birds that lead her to a confession of a hidden wound of her own. An example of her great skill and imagination is "Oriole," a perfect elegy written as a description of an oriole's nest: To build their nest they stole my mother's cigarettes.Next they snagged her booze. They took her heatingpads and measuring cups. Plucked her blood-soakedtissues, bright as carnations, from the waste basket;they took her shopping list, zip-up boots, Katrinathe cat, feeding tube. Her glasses and the book on herlap. Filched her Sweet Dreams Tea, her FIELD GUIDETO BIRDS. It wasn't all in this order, but they stole herEaster wreath, the tumor in her throat, ironing board,perfect penmanship, black-silk slip, her late night bowlof ice cream and Cool Whip. They tried to take her lastwords, but she snatched those back, took those with her. In this poem the poet sums up what had remained of her mother's life, but instead of making these items script on a tombstone, she makes them part of an oriole's scavenging for its nest. Who among us would have thought of such a thing? [End Page 112] Her mother appears in the very first poem in the book, "Owl." The owl is a familiar, like a witch's cat, who perches spinning her head on her daughter's windowsill at night—her "daughter of hurt and squeal." The daughter knows that "when she dies / you'll inherit all she's swallowed / whole yet had to leave behind." "Crow" is the first poem that explains a bit about the mother and her lifelong absence. The poet meets a sister whom she did not know. The sister recognizes her, because she looks just like her real mother. The sister, full of false reassurance, tells her: If our mother had kept you,my newly found sister said,you'd never have goneto college. Wouldn't have donea lot of things you've done. There's a whole stanza in response to this: "—if she had kept me?" The story continues: A rooster crows;crows caw. Explain that,and while you're at it, howyou came to laugh my mother'slaugh, my newly found sister said.I said, I never claimed to be anyone'sinterpreter. She said, Our, I meant to sayour mother. It turns out the mother has been dead seventeen years already. The poet says: "At her grave / I left a silver earring / for the crows to find." There's a kind of unraveling of the mother's acts, starting with her living in a convent and teaching, while she saved money to travel to Arizona after her baby was born. We never quite understand why she can't take the child along with her, as apparently she goes on to marry and have other children. About the mother's death: Round and around my first mother's deathbedflew the Sisters of Bristol, that murderof crows. [End Page 113] I have another daughter, she whisperedto her husband. Low, so her childrenwouldn't hear.He promised to find me. Thinkingthis would make her live. In "Goldfinch" Kearney veers into violent language, describing the goldfinch as trying to pull the crown of thorns off the head of Christ at the Crucifixion. The poem goes on to describe Christians being devoured by lions. The next poem, "Duckling, Swan," describes the satisfaction of the belittled swan in a nest of ducks who grows up to blind her siblings. A pantoum...
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Jun 4, 2024
Maite G Fernández-Barrena + 1
Open Access
