An Open Arts Forum collection
Birds Among Us
Poetry, fiction, art, and photography about birds in everyday life and memory
Birds enter these works through familiar places: a backyard, a childhood landscape, a kitchen window. Their calls and movements attract attention, but the attention rarely stays with the birds alone. It travels into memory, household tensions, the passage of time, and the unsettling possibility of absence.
Bob Bradshaw returns to the birds of a remembered Florida. Rod Raglin gathers crow portraits from his Vancouver backyard, while Mary MacGowan paints species that can no longer be encountered there or anywhere else. In Ann Kammerer's story, crows become troubling neighbors; Lance Jencks lets birdsong open a surprisingly unruly domestic scene.
Moving among poetry, fiction, painting, and photography, this collection offers several ways of looking and listening. Its birds can be beautiful, irritating, ominous, or gone. Each encounter leaves a different impression on the human world around it.
In this collection
Read in order, or begin anywhere.
Poetry
Birds of Florida
Birds accompany a return to childhood waters, landscapes, and discoveries. Bradshaw lets their remembered calls carry the poem toward a wider sense of disappearance, giving the collection an opening in which close observation and recollection are inseparable.
Photography
Crow
Raglin gathers crow portraits made in his Vancouver backyard. The compilation gives a familiar neighbor sustained attention, offering a photographic pause between the remembered birds of the opening poem and the vanished species in the paintings that follow.
Watercolor
Extinct Birds – Series of 3
MacGowan's first three paintings in an extinct-bird series depict two wrens and a macaw. The watercolors bring distinct forms and colors into view, making an encounter through art possible where an encounter with a living bird is no longer available.
Fiction
Summer of Crows
Persistent crows trouble a woman already contending with unemployment and domestic strain. Kammerer lets their presence gather unease as the story unfolds, placing the birds within a human landscape of frustration, uncertainty, and ominous advice.
Poetry
The Bird Outside Our Kitchen
An exuberant response to birdsong takes an abrupt domestic turn. Jencks uses the distance between the bird's performance and the human listener's life to make a mischievous closing piece, unsettling expectations of a purely peaceful nature poem.
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