Dark Devouring: Songs from Magpie & Sun Mountain

Think of Dark Devouring as a riff on Czeslaw Milosz’s impossible question: What is magpiety? Or as beautifully irreverent counterpastoral, uncanny eco-music that soothes, then rattles the limbic system. Equal parts love story/war story, it’s a meditation on one man’s growing admiration for magpies, targets of fierce, systematic extermination schemes. These poems spread a gospel of magpiety, dispatches of hope from the ecological wasteland, gazettes meant to restore faith in the healing power of old-time song-in the belief that blind/lost in a dark wood or on the rocky trail up Sun Mountain, singing makes the road easier.

This polyphonic, hybrid collection encompasses one ecopoet’s attempt to bird-dog his hunch it’s more productive to think of man as a metaphor for magpie, not the other way around. Along the path to Sun Mountain, both the mystery and measure of magpiety screw in and out of focus, repeatedly, strangely, like some drunk old monk’s vision, as he stands before a urinal, trying to read on the wall above him a daily gazette (gazza = Italian for magpie). Like Wallace Stevens’s blackbird study, this collection revels in myriad ways of seeing magpie; its emotional and narrative arc loops like a zoomorphic Celtic knot through multiple sightings/citings/sitings of magpies voiced by diverse historical personages (an Anglo-Saxson scop, Arapaho storytellers, Gertrude Stein, Lewis and Clark).

Think, finally, of Dark Devouring as an (un)natural history of magpies meant to devour darkness-cast light where ignorance, superstition, suspicion of what’s Other threatens our survival as a species. Not for the fainthearted, this book sees whole convocations of magpies slaughtered; it mouths hard truths, rages at our current predicament. Yet magpie’s a bird word that survives as avian populations plummet, as languages go the way of the dodo. The bird dressed in black and white endures.