What Hummingbirds Do by Louise Cary Barden

 

“Barden’s poems revel in the anticipatory state of a held breath: listening to the lap of water or the call of a loon, watching a flock of ibises twist in the sky, remembering a moment of cradling sudsy dishes as a child. Lush and rich in the details of nature and memory, she will guide you gently back to awe, to wonder, to the small moments that make up a life.”

–Brenna Crotty, Senior Editor, Calyx,A Journal of Art and Literature By Women

 

Louise Barden is a poet who has mastered both narrative and lyrical poetry.  In this book memories moves with ease from childhood to the recent past. Nature abounds in these poems, whether it is the exquisite details of her Grandmother’s garden, or her last chance to canoe a river before the seasons change, or seeing Ibis fill the sky for the first time. In her beautiful lyric, Early Daffodils, Barden writes:

 

“Love, show me how to rush into the world again,

how to pluck and gather such joy.

Teach me how go fill my arms with gold.”

This book is full of gold.

–Doug Stone, author of The Season of Distress and Clarity

 

In her What Hummingbirds Do, Louise Barden embroiders a tapestry “where day’s first light split[s] gold through hanging dew”, and yet “we stand trapped inside the great cone. the past.” She takes the reader through explorations, mostly in nature, and with a backward glance towards family—grandmother, mother, sisters—“where July birches lean out as if to see their own green whispers” (“Viewpoint”) and where her nine year old self climbs high to stand “on a branch so thin it bends under [her] feet” so she can “ride the wind . . .long enough . . . to glimpse the whole world” (“Into the world”). This gutsy kid appears again in “On Drifts” where she and her sisters navigate deep snow “with clumsy, careful breast strokes”—they “swam [their] way to Church.”

 

As the poems move into her adult life, her affinity for the natural world does not waver. She stops “frozen, gazing into a sky . . . split by patterned coils of moving wings,” her first view of migrating ibis (“The Dazzling Invisibility”). She shares her losses, confronts death, survives winter, “those dreary weeks at home” (“Under a Changing Sky”), until “the once grey air glows incandescent . . . reflections of a greater hand.”

 

In the prize-winning title poem, she walks with a woman newly met, another birdwatcher who enriches her knowledge of hummingbirds. “We walked slowly, exchanging details, as women do . . .  what we do when men are not beside us . . . when suddenly the woman says “straight He’s having an affair. . . I had scant advice.”  Intimacy without pretense. As with the rest of her poems, her truthfulness gleams as brightly as her diamonds in Walmart (“Reflections at the Checkout”). Without guile or artifice, and with a deep commitment to lush, lyric language and craft, Barden carries us to the finish. Mark this as a must read!

–Rachel Barton,  author of This is the Lightness