In this Book
- Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay
- Book
- 2013
- Published by: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
- Series: Environmental Humanities
Ornithologies of Desire develops ecocritical reading strategies that engage scientific texts, field guides, and observation. Focusing on poetry about birds and birdwatching, this book argues that attending to specific details about the physical world when reading environmentally conscious poetry invites a critical humility in the face of environmental crises and evolutionary history.
The poetry and poetics of Don McKay provide Ornithologies of Desire with its primary subject matter, which is predicated on attention to ornithological knowledge and avian metaphors. This focus on birds enables a consideration of more broadly ecological relations and concerns, since an awareness of birds in their habitats insists on awareness of plants, insects, mammals, rocks, and all else that constitutes place. The book’s chapters are organized according to: apparatus (that is, science as ecocritical tool), flight, and song.
Reading McKay’s work alongside ecology and ornithology, through flight and birdsong, both challenges assumptions regarding humans’ place in the earth system and celebrates the sheer virtuosity of lyric poetry rich with associative as well as scientific details. The resulting chapters, interchapter, and concordance of birds that appear in McKay’s poetry encourage amateurs and specialists, birdwatchers and poetry readers, to reconsider birds in English literature on the page and in the field.
BEGINNINGSIntroducing Don McKay’s Avian Poetics: Science and Literature, Ecocriticism, and Risk
Travis V. Mason
Provides a framework by contextualizing bird poetry in English, explaining the book's focus on Don McKay's work, and setting up a rationale for the sustained attention to birds. Positions McKay's body of work within a long tradition of avian poetics.
1
Attending “the rough-legged uncles of the wind”: Sceince and/as Intertext, Naming and/as Knowing
Travis V. Mason
Introduces the Birder-Critic (BC), a fictional figure devised to model the attempt to get out of the office and into the field. Offers a critical meditation on the notion of Field Marks in McKay's and others' work.
2
‘Shades of pause / and spill’: Homing, Flying, Falling
Travis V. Mason
Continues to follow the efforts of the Birder-Critic, this time focusing on the genre of the Field Guide as it pertains to experience and to the practice of writing poetry.
3
‘Seeping from frontiers of the audible’: Songs for the Songs of the Singers
Travis V. Malone
Concludes the Birder-Critic's story by considering the genre and production of Field Notes, particularly as the term “notes” resonates with the preceding chapters' interest in birdsong. Completes three-part process that includes identifying marks, reading guides, and, finally, writing notes.
ENDINGS
‘ode of the earth’: Nests and Geopoetry
Travis V. Malone
Offers three ways of moving forward by extending the book's main arguments: an examination of nests and nesting, in which McKay is considered a modern-day John Clare; an overview of McKay's “geopoetics,” which have occupied his work since 2000; and analyses of McKay's raven poems, which bring together avian and geopoetics to put humans in our place among the most recent of natural phenomena.
Table of Contents
- Title Page, Copyright Page
- pp. 2-5
- Acknowledgements
- pp. vii-viii
- A Note on the Cover
- pp. ix-x
- Beginnings : An Introduction
- pp. xi-xx
- PART ONE
- Chapter One: Nesting
- pp. 3-14
- Chapter Two: Naming
- pp. 15-30
- Ecotone One: Field Marks
- pp. 31-42
- PART TWO
- Chapter Three: Homologies
- pp. 45-62
- Chapter Four: Flight
- pp. 63-80
- Chapter Five: Gravity
- pp. 81-98
- Ecotone Two: Field Guides
- pp. 99-112
- PART THREE
- Chapter Six: Notes
- pp. 115-128
- Chapter Seven: Birdsong
- pp. 129-146
- Chapter Eight: Listening
- pp. 147-160
- Ecotone Three: Field Notes
- pp. 161-175
- PART FOUR
- Chapter Nine: Birder-Poet
- pp. 177-194
- Chapter Ten: Science
- pp. 195-214
- Ecotone Four: Field Trips
- pp. 215-222
- Ending: Ravens
- pp. 223-226
- Appendix: Bird Concordance
- pp. 227-236
- Works Cited
- pp. 259-276
Additional Information
Copyright
2013