American Birds: A Literary Companion

Description

Featuring some of America's greatest writers and poets, this landmark anthology is both a celebration of the birds around and above us and a field guide to the American soul. Americans have always been fascinated by birds and from the beginning American writers have captured this keen interest in a variety of genres- poems, journals, memoirs, short stories, essays, and travel accounts. Now, editors Terry Tempest Williams and Andrew Rubenfeld bring together the very best of this writing on America's birds in an astonshing collection that encompasses the Aleutian Islands and the Florida Keys, the Maine woods to the deserts of the southwest--and our own gardens and backyards feeders. What better companion to a field guide to the birds of North America than these personal accounts of birds and bird watching by a Who's Who of American literature? Put your binoculars aside and listen to the exquisite beauty of three Native American songs about birds, follow Lewis and Clark as they encounter new species on their journey across the continent, look over Audubon's shoulder as he sketches in New Orleans, and join Emerson and Thoreau rambling around Walden Pond. Here too are Theodore Roosevelt as he recalls the birds of his New York childhood, Rachel Carson observing a skimmer on the Atlantic coast, and Roger Tory Peterson casting a keen eye on snail kites and limpkins in the Everglades. Add to this an impressive array of modern and contemporary poets celebrating the wonder of birds and the joys of bird watching, including Robert Frost, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, Sterling A. Brown, Cornelius Eady, Mary Oliver, Linda Hogan, and Louis Erdrich. This chronological survey of how and why Americans have watched birds makes the perfect gift for both the serious birder and the backyard watcher, indeed anyone who's ever been drawn by the wonder of birds.

Terry Tempest Williams is a Utah-based naturalist, conservationist, and activist. She has received the Wallace Stegner Award (from the Center of the American West), the John Muir Award (from the Sierra Club), and the Robert Marshall Award (from the Wilderness Society). Her books include Refuge- An Unnatural History of Family and Place (1991), Finding Beauty in a Broken World (2008), When Women Were Birds (2012), and The Hour of Land- A Personal Topography of America's National Parks (2015). She is currently a writer in residence at the Harvard Divinity School.

"Beyond singsong delight, the pieces provide a fascinating index of the development of American literature through the centuries: why, one might ask, might authors now find birds a subject more fit for poetry than prose, where two centuries ago the opposite was true? In any case, the volume demonstrates that delight can come in small packages." -The New Criterion "Evocative and absorbing. . . . All who read it will find their own favorites among the 74 appealing selections and will marvel at the many different ways to see, think about, describe, and cherish birds and their place in our lives." -The Urban Audubon "An exquisite compendium celebrating America's ornithological obsession." -Kirkus Reviews