The Bird

Hayden Carruth (ed.)

First and foremost, please note the ed. after the name Hayden Carruth. Why? Because it stands for “editor.” Online booksellers (and libraries) who list a book as being by, instead of edited by, a particular author set people up for disappointment, especially if it's a book that's been out of print for decades and the person has been tracking it down for years.

The Bird/Poem Book suffers from the same major problem as most anthologies of its type; there simply aren't enough quality poems written on any very specific topic to come up with a top-quality anthology of that sort. And this one was very specific; poems about birds, but that don't pretend to be about anything BUT birds. (In other words, no Gerard Manley Hopkins' wonderful “Windhover” here, which would have increased the quality of the collection tremendously.) And, really, the only poem that lives up to the quality one would hope for from an anthology that is so small (one assumes they kept it to slightly over fifty pages because they couldn't find enough of quality) is Carruth's own piece. Note that being up to the quality hoped for from an anthology of this sort is not the same as being up to Carruth's usual quality (this is decidedly inferior to many of the pieces in Asphalt Georgics, Collected Shorter Poems, etc). The rest of the collection ranges from the good and famous (Whitman) to the overrated, awful, and famous (Emily Dickinson, with yet another poem that can be sung to the tune of “The Yellow Rose of Texas”). Included are a number of now-obscure poets of various quality; some of them it seems a crime to have let fade into oblivion, but that could well be the company they're keeping here; for all we know, they sucked.

I'm sure that my disappointment in finding this not to be a Carruth book, as advertised in multiple places, affected my rating. But such is life. Now, Amazon, and Lakewood Public Library, please, strive for accuracy in reporting.