Shaler's Fish
Poems
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- $11.99
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- $11.99
Publisher Description
“Devoted readers of H Is for Hawk will find Macdonald’s gift for stunning language, patient curiosity, and expansive wisdom on full display in her poems.”—Publishers Weekly
From the naturalist and author of the New York Times bestseller H is for Hawk, which appeared on more than twenty-five Best Books of the Year lists, Shaler’s Fish is a collection of poetry that roams both the outer and inner landscapes of the poet’s universe, seamlessly fusing reflections on language, science, and literature with the loamy environments of the natural worlds around her. Moving between the epic (war, history, art, myth, philosophy) and the specific (CNN, Ancient Rome, Auden, Merleau-Ponty), Helen Macdonald examines with humor and intellect what it means to be awake and watchful in the world. These are poems that probe and question, within whose nimble ecosystems we are as likely to encounter Schubert as we are “a hand of violets,” Isaac Newton as a “winged quail on turf.” Nothing escapes Macdonald’s eye and every creature herein—from the smallest bird to the loftiest thinker—holds a significant place in her poems.
“Macdonald is a poet of vision and sound, oracular one moment and playful the next, whose first love and only loyalty is to the music of words.” –O, the Oprah Magazine
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Macdonald, a British historian, naturalist, and illustrator, made waves with her memoir, H Is for Hawk, but in her debut collection of poetry she goes beyond simply observing the natural world, displaying the indefatigable curiosity that motivated the early naturalists who inspire her. Macdonald employs her knowledge of the natural sciences as she deftly works scientific discoveries into poems on such subjects as love, politics, solitude, death, and more. Her imagery encompasses biology, geology, physics, weather patterns, and astronomy. For example, in "Hyperion to a Satellite," she invokes Widmanst tten patterns found in meteorites: "Widmanst tten's grating pat, with a formula/ of primitive and suitably drenched olivine. Noble metals// are dropped onto accident blackspots hailing/ from districts of open light, glossing the connectives// with a discriminating solar bombardment." The rich and heady language calls to mind the tradition of the English Romantic poets while offering wholly new and original constructions: "the shade of your eyes approximates the blade's blued dorsal edge/ indigent as the model's side or even air, seen from below// every moment describes some other music/ and I cannot remember banality ever existing." Devoted readers of H Is for Hawk will find Macdonald's gift for stunning language, patient curiosity, and expansive wisdom on full display in her poems.
