“Bird Light” by Elizabeth Cohen, St. Julian Press, 2016

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We plunge headlong through our lives and their spinning hours, but poetry can remind us that beauty is everywhere, and beauty is outside of time. The poet’s job is to pay attention and to share with readers what we have perhaps forgotten to notice.

In “Bird Light,” Elizabeth Cohen’s eye is on the sky, so she notices the way crows “threw their shadows down like spent napkins,” but also on the land, where the road wears “its loosestrife dress.”

The poet’s job also is to reimagine the world, re-see it, lest we take it too much for granted. In the imaginative “The Book of Sparrow,” Cohen tells a new creation story, a history of the world with sparrow as spirit: “And the sparrow light was tossed over the water/and that became dawn,” and “Sparrow opened its wings above/to pull across the blankets of dawn and dusk/and carried a raft of stars on its back …” and “sparrow wrote in sparrow hieroglyphics/upon the final days …” A poem can lead us to take a second look at that little brown striped bird on the wire – the world agleam in its eye.

A primary tool of poetry is the image. An image can embody some complexity of thinking/feeling that is otherwise inexpressible but for an image, and the space and silence around it. So birds, of course, with such a title, flock among these poems. But when they are at their best, the poems outfly the birds.

In the poem, “Latin Names of Birds and Binomial Nomenclature,” for example, thinking about the outlandish scientific names of birds (the absurd Turdus migrotorius is only the lowly robin) and the dusty tome of the International Code of Zoological Nomenclature leads the author to this fine consideration: “… all things/have two names//one to connect them to other creatures//one just to call their own.”

And in “Festival of the Cranes,” the cranes are a blizzard in the Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge. But this is also a place near where the narrator’s best friend’s brother was in prison, and a place where the narrator and a boy broke down in his old truck. So memory and place become layered in this poem, and time is both present and past, but moving. The brother, now free, tends gardens, and the boy sells used cars. And the birds? Ah, the birds:

“The rise and rise and rise of a species,

as if the ground itself has decided to fly.

Not far from heaven, really, if heaven is a place

where things lift up

by some internal power

and move on with their lives.”

The book’s sections are punctuated with the imaginative line drawings of poet Aliki Barnstone, two of which also make for a graceful cover to this collection.

Elizabeth Cohen teaches at Plattsburgh State and has also published books of fiction and memoir.