Birds of the Midwest by Jane Hufford Downes

In Birds of the Midwest, poet Jane Hufford Downes reminds us that “[n]ature only asks that we love / by paying attention.” And, indeed, these poems—careful observations of warblers, cranes, and robins who refuse to leave their home in winter—sing a hymn of wonder. Hufford Downes writes with precision. Her images are exact and arresting; her metaphors open new doorways between our “mud-bound” existence and the bird, who’s free to “hurl[] herself into the wind.” With a wisdom grounded in both the earth and our own impermanence, Hufford Downes watches the birds to learn how to live. Birds of the Midwest is a salve.
–Ranae Lenor Hanson, author of Watershed: Attending to Body and Earth in Distress

Readers of “Birds of the Midwest” will live more deeply today, chart their paths more graciously toward forever. The 23 lyrical poems in Jane Hufford Downes’s collection fly toward the eternal by focusing on detail. Reminding readers that “crows colonize the edges,” she meditates on hummingbirds and warblers who dip and dive among the ubiquitous crows. Nature, Downes says, “asks that we love/ by paying attention.” Steeped in specifics, the poems open into gentle, humor-threaded philosophy: “things change, sometimes even for the better.” Downes describes her wheelchair “mud-bound to Earth”; later, she writes, “On some future day, I will return. A particle of dust becoming prairie, whispering in the breeze, nurturing clover which feeds the buzz and lift of a bumblebee, and who, in turn, becomes lunch for a crow.” Mud-bound ourselves, we readers lift off with Downes and her birds.
–Chelsea B. DesAutels, author of A Dangerous Place

Jane Hufford Downes focuses her attention in this collection on the delights and mysteries of bird life. As she explores their origin in dinosaurs, the wonders of their migration “chasing the northern edge of spring,” and the “absurd beauty of the world,” she seeks—and finds—”music that resonates in your bones.” Anyone who enjoys the natural world, and birding in particular, is sure to find treasures within this volume.
–Julie Cadwallader Staub, author of Wing Over Wing: Poems, Paraclete Press, 2019.

Bird watching requires the same sort of patient attention as writing poetry. In this collection of poems, Jane Downes displays how she has cultivated the skills of careful observation and stillness needed for both. Through her writing, she has done what the Great Mother asks birds to do: “listen to the Silence / until music resonates in your bones.” The poet’s quest for big human truths grows naturally from her detailed studies of birds: their flight and apparent freedom, their resilience as they “hurl (themselves) into the wind,” their indomitable spirit and the way they “accept resurrection.” She blends science with prayer, allowing what she learns from birds to show the reader glimpses of the unknowable. Though she is “mud-bound to Earth,” for Ms. Downes, birds have become “magical prophets, fallen angels, messengers of gods” who can lift us up if we take the time to pay attention. This is a writer for whom a wingtip can be the center of the universe, what is improbable can also be true, and awe is something that helps us endure. Reading these poems reminds me of birdsong itself – a mysterious language that somehow speaks of hope.
–Joanne Esser, author of the poetry collections Humming at the Dinner Table and I Have Always Wanted Lightning