Béatrice Szymkowiak, B/RDS
Re/sound
How pleasing when aclouded sky
ripens with rain. Water-logged
seeds imagine blossoms& the swell
of duration / wings sail along
ponds & hedges /clear rivulets
root rivers. Hear in shallowpools,
the unremitted flappings/ flocks
wading the course of days
in the afterstorm / an axe’sthud
hung at the extremity ofa twig
drops & drowns. Ringsripple,
quills / fly off.
Thefull-length debut by French-American writer and scholar Béatrice Szymkowiak [see her recent '12 or 20 questions' interview here],following RED ZONE (Finishing Line Press, 2018), is B/RDS (SaltLake City UT: The University of Utah Press, 2023), published as winner of theAgha Shahid Ali Prize in Poetry. Much like New Hampshire-based Polish-American poetand translator Ewa Chrusciel’s recent Yours, Purple Gallinule (Omnidawn,2022) [see my review of such here], B/RDS (obviously) is a book of birdsthat writes into the Anthropocene and out of John James Audobon’s Birds ofAmerica (1827-1838) as a source text both for content and language, pullingthreads and highlighting the losses of entire species of birds due to humaninterference. As Szymkowiak offers as part of the book’s “Preface”:
My writingprocess started by considering the text of Birds of America (the OrnithologicalBiography accompanying the drawings) as an archival cage. For this reason, Iresolved to strictly abide by the rule of keeping the order of the words (orletters) from the text-source—my text-source being Birds of America in alphabetical order. I then selectively erasedthe textual cage to reveal its ambiguity and the complex relationship betweenhumanity and the other-than-human world. As the cage disappeared, birdsescaped, their voices inextricably entangled with ours—a spectral, equivocal “we.”Finally, I reshuffled the resulting poems and added migratory poems written inmy own words and prompted from lines from the erasure poems. These migratorypoems, like ripples, trace the link between past and present.
B/RDS is a book of precision and moving through space,through air, propelled and attuned to a uniquely-magical language and lyric. Thereis such delight and play of strike and sound through these lines, even as eachpoem sits as an individual cobblestone or brick, each set to articulate theaccumulated outline of her subject of ecological erosion. She writes on birds,and the waves of man-made losses and their rippling effects. As Agha Shahid AliPrize judge Monica Youn writes as part of her “Foreward”: “Throughout Béatrice Szymkowiak’sdevastatingly beautiful B/RDS, I felt as if I were responding to asimilar call, but the echoing voices in this collection are real, urgent,inescapable—a fusion of elegy and prophecy. With its trills and elisions, gracenotes and percussive cries, the collection gives voice to the billions of birdslost on this continent over the past decades through human predation, industrialization,waste and sprawl—James Elroy Flecker’s classic phrase seems apt: ‘That silencewhere the birds are dead / yet something pipeth like a bird.’” Szymkowiak simultaneouslywrites directly and slant on birds and their losses, writing of seasons andflights, of sun and landscapes along the ridge. As the prose poem “Wherever SunEnds” writes, in full: “Two crows perched in the pine grove caw ghosts ofunsung passing. Ice spears from the eaves. Dread devours clouds. I fear howtangible your tongue before its silence. Deer ellipses dot the snow thawing clock.On the ground, a red-tailed hawk claws & tears its own disappearance.”
The Night Is Pitch-Darkbut We /
murmur through shatteredglass breathe, breathe, the light from dead stars still glows! Along nighteaves, mangled starlings heave stellar wings to tenebrous ceilings & tiltequinox back to breathe, breathe constellations. Light isshattered from the mangled night. how many dead stars still glow?Tenebrous wings cleave away from you, heave equinox back to pitch-darkceilings. Breathe, breathe, starlings murmur along mangled eaves, howconstellations tilt from dead stars to light! Still you,shattered wings through tenebrous glass murmur how many, how many dead stars
& cleave equinoxhalves away.
