The Sphere of Birds
Poems
by Ciaran Berry
Southern
Illinois University Press
&
Crab Orchard Review
Carbondale,
Illinois
ISBN:
13: 978-0-8093-2838-3
75
Pages
Review
by Dennis Daly
Splicing
together images from the natural world with internalized passion and the
personal re-recorded perceptions of life, Ciaran Berry creates poems with
mythical power and winged beauty. He sings like a troubadour and shares the
secrets of this bird-world like a twenty-first century Francis of Assisi. Only
darker.
Berry
opens his collection with a sonnet, a meditation on a murdered crow. The crow
hangs from a pole and serves to warn others of its kind against intrusion. It
also seems to exhort the reader to tread carefully in this barbarous life. Even
the vegetation has a taste for flesh. Here is the cautionary conclusion,
Things
weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,
brittle
and white, dead twig snapped underfoot
where
the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,
and
harsher truths hit home after hour—
the
sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,
a
fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.
With
deftness and seeming syntactic ease Berry conjures a powerful narrative in his
poem Topography with Storm Petrels & Arctic Tern. He interweaves multiple
stories, including a father’s job loss, an Audubon voyage, and a Van Gelderen
sketch of an artic tern, which counterpoint and build in strength to a dread-inducing
climax. Consider these lines where the poet examines a time of misery and
change merging into an Audubon meditation,
it
is the year my brother and I find a jackdaw
with a broken wing, the year the
fish farm
where our father
works closes its doors. The tanks
in
the hatchery are emptied of oysters,
the mussel rafts are dragged
ashore, and most
of what we know
vanishes like the wallet
and
keys the magician picks from our old man’s
pockets as he assists with a
trick at the circus,
choosing a card, checking a
bowler hat for holes.
Although
all we know will never be returned.
Lying on his bunk, nothing left to
empty
from his belly,
Audubon stares through
An
iced porthole at the almost black that runs
beyond the eye and thinks of how
his life
will be a journey
from one fixed point to another
with
only open water in between…
My
favorite piece in this collection projects a three pronged narrative into a
delicately balanced counterpoint. The intersection points of the stories carry
the reader back and forth in poetic space like perfectly calibrated railroad
switches. The poet introduces Philippe Petit, the French high-wire artist who
walked between the twin towers of the World Trade Center early one morning in
1975. Add to that nervy portraiture the poet’s account of his own childhood
carsickness in that same timeframe and a seemingly disparate consideration of Harte
Crane’s suicide and something magical (read high art) happens. Early in the
poem Berry sets up two of his thematic strands,
…They
are no bigger than a swarm of flies
from
where the wire walker hangs his eye, feels for the fulcrum
in his balancing pole, and then, with a
sharp intake of breath,
takes his first step, trusts where he
must go. All of this happens
thirty
years ago, when I’m just four, a nervous middle child
who takes sick on every car journey of more
than five miles,
retches and heaves until there’s nothing
left but yellow bile.
My
mother’s tried a series of folk-cures—a length of chain
suspended from the rusted tow bar to spark
all the static
out of the car, a parsley necklace
fixed around my throat,
where
it serves as a sort of vegetable amulet, but nothing works.
A
Beard of Bees, Berry’s rather strange poem about playing with nature, ends with
a question that begs unwanted answers. The protagonist of the poem watches a
beekeeper abscond with a hive’s queen and imprison her in a little cage which
hangs beneath his chin. Predictably the bees fall upon him forming a beard. Barry’s
attention moves smoothly between the performance and the audience as the poem advances
into its penultimate stanza,
They
dipped and landed on the keeper’s cheeks,
settled into the beard he wore,
mouth almost shut,
nostrils blocked with
cotton wool. And it struck me
that
all of this must be to do with death:
the way the bees had scrieved
across the air,
their see-through
wings thrashing in unison;
the
keeper’s need to feel against his flesh
that knot of tangled muscle and
barbed sting;
our need to watch,
awestruck, like the rough crowd
at
a hanging, as the moment crackled open,
the field and the minutes
suddenly rent,
unfixed…
Sketching
a realm of dinosaur-eyes and symbolic Christs in his title poem, The Sphere of
Birds, Berry meditates on the limitations of body and soul. The story line
switches back and forth between the narrator’s brother and his favorite movie.
Augury and omens rise from a Philadelphia neighborhood until local reality
turns mythical. The poet closes his poem by lamenting the constraints of memory
as well as a change in self,
In
one of the last pictures he produced, a boy’s shaved skull—
his own, I think, although it could
be anyone’s—
bends
forward in supplication and regret, floats huge
above the charcoal pews and gothic
arches of a church.
And
though I set him back at the window, and fill
his pallet and horsehair brush
with watercolor blues
and
greens, though I press rewind and watch the bird rise
from shattering to fly backwards
out of the reformed
pane,
it’s not the same, it’s nothing I could ever want.
Rising
in a flock, beyond miraculous, Berry’s poems soar with self-contained
direction. Impressively, they dare the heavens.
