Rara Avis: For the Birds

Sometimes when I’m walking the Petaluma hills, I hear all around me trills and whistling calls, but only rarely do I see birds making this morning music. That is, unless I have a companion familiar with their avian ways-someone who can teach me where to look and listen, how to see and hear. Sandra Anfang’s Rara Avis offers a kind of field guide of the heart, rendering visible what our own eyes so often overlook, articulating what remains mute in the heart. The poet’s powers of observation, her dazzling metaphors, and the music and deftness of her forms make these poems a joy, a treasure, rich with the iridescent colors of a world given wings.

-Terry Ehret, author of Lost Body and Night Sky Journey

In Rara Avis, we’re introduced to ＂hummingbirds who drank like frat boys at my backyard bar.＂ Inthis collection, Sandra Anfang demonstrates she is (pardon the pun) a rare bird herself and a gifted writer who has elevated her joy of birdwatching to incisive and insightful art. These poems glide with gentle humor, fearless introspection, and delightful discoveries, from two ravens outside a classroom of students reading Poe, to a couple’s reverie of ＂hearts conjoined / our avian thirst briefly quenched.＂ As the narrator in ＂Morning Glory＂ expresses ＂Gratitude ... for how / the flame was passed to me,＂ readers will be grateful for this contemplative collection.

-Robert Eugene Rubino, author of Douglas Knocks Out Tyson, Vanity Unfair, and Aficionado

This book is not only a festivity of birds. It’s about insurance policies against loneliness, ancestors in the magic of a place, love preserved within a shell of pain, a father in life, and a father’s casket riding on hydraulics down to a watery grave. And then there are the birds. In all forms: haiku, haibun, golden shovels in the garden of wings and feathers. ＂A raven / kneeling on my chest, titmouse at the suet, mustard / swarm of waterfowl.＂ This party is inviting us to look around, listen, notice, and most of all, to read.

-Phyllis Klein, author ofThe Full Moon Herald