Come Late to the Love of Birds

by Sandra Kasturi

Sandra’s first collection, The Animal Bridegroom featured an introduction by Neil Gamin and has sold out. This collection expands on her themes of abject romances, deformed fairytales gone and the astonishing delights of life in glorious 21st century.

Kasturi's latest poetry book fuses nature's continuous emotional offerings, our desire to understand ourselves with our passion to be free, devoid of the burden of modern thought.

Genres: Poetry, Canada

125 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2012

About the author

Author of The Animal Bridegroom (Tightrope Books; introduction by Neil Gaiman). Co-Publisher of ChiZine Publications. Co-organizer of the Toronto SpecFic Colloquium and the Chiaroscuro Reading Series. Founder of the CZP/Rannu Fund for Writers of Speculative Literature. Co-editor (with Halli Villegas) of the yearly series Imaginarium: Best Canadian Speculative Writing. Founding member of the Algonquin Square Table Poetry Workshop and the Bellefire Club.

Reviews

[Emily Kestrel]

I think I've read a good variety of books this year, but sadly, I seem to have neglected poetry. I really like poetry, but I tend to go back to my favorites over and over rather than try new works, which is a shame, because there are so many interesting poets out there. And this was an interesting little collection. If I had to summarize my reaction to it in just a couple of words, I would say these poems are clever and playful. Kasturi often seems to be playing with words and concepts, just to see what happens and how far she can go (at least, this was the impression I got as I was reading), and sometimes it works, and sometimes the results are just...weird. But that's okay. I like weird poetry too. And bonus points for all the sonnets!

My favorite poems: One Red Thought; Hummingbird Hagiography; Speaking Crow; Obese Mythologies; Bird Logic; Lark

Why only three stars? (Besides the fact that I am a really picky reader and few books rate higher than "I liked it"?) It is probably just my tastes, but while I appreciated the poems, none of them really astounded me. I think, perhaps, I found them a bit too clever for their own good? Even so, I would definitely recommend poetry lovers to take a look. Kasturi has an interesting command of language and an original imagination.

[Ann Schwader]

This is an elegantly produced little volume of (mostly) bird-related & speculative poems, a surprising number of them formal. I was expecting a more sf/fantasy tone, but found myself caught up in the sheer craftsmanship instead.

Love of language -- especially the sound of language -- predominates here. A very few of these poems were a bit too surreal / experimental for me to appreciate, but in general I read each one two or three times to savor it -- which is why I've been taking so long getting through this small book. Kasturi builds enough into her poems to reward that attention, so this collection is well worth buying if you prefer your spec poetry with a formal or literary edge.

[DivaDiane SM]

I have reviewed this lovely collection on AmazingStoriesMag.com:

http://amazingstoriesmag.com/2013/06/...

[Uudenkuun Emilia]

I heard Sandra Kasturi read one poem from this collection at Worldcon in Dublin, 2019 ("Augury"). The beauty and grace of her words led me to buy Come Late to the Love of Birds - and finally, almost a year later, I had the brainspace to read it.

What a gorgeous collection this is. Not every poem hit home for me, but there were several that left me breathless with word-joy and poem-magic, and I savoured them slowly. This is definitely a collection I'll return to, to reread individual poems and bask in their beauty. I found myself especially enjoying Kasturi's masterful use of poetic forms, although her free verse is also lovely.

Poems I particularly loved: "You give me nothing but words...", "The Movement of Men and Gods", "Let Us Begin", "The Soft Key", "The Bloody Chamber".

[Wendy S. Delmater]

The title is a reference to not noticing birds until late in life, and by metaphorical extension finally noticing other things that had hovered on the edges of awareness. This poetry chapbook is a paean to what can be the sharp, discerning reality of later years, when humans start to truly realize that they are not indestructible. So it’s a self-aware little tome, full of meaning wrapping in avian metaphors. Below, I provide a few tastes of this feast of words, hoping to entice you to read all of her poetry. Sandra Kasturi is maestro.

For example, this on the impermanence of promises:

You give me nothing but words

vermilion and verdigris and very

smooth as pebbles

shaped by the rough tongue of centuries.

If you were to place me in your mouth

would I not become a word then—

a strange sound echoing across the desert,

my bones and consonants sanded away

leaving nothing behind

but hieroglyphs of wind.



Or this, on the numbing effects of routine:

It’s these household rages that do me in,

fret me into a guitar-plucked hum,

a dissonance of dishes, roasting chickens

clucked quick into the oven, their crumb-

tossed, butter-paled bodies dimpling in glass pans,

heated caskets ready for the cremation

of Sunday dinner and the Monday dance,

the weekly pirouette of desperation.

There I am, humped in a chair by the window

in some nameless café, swallowing tea

by the styrofoam cupful, fat with sorrow

and dulled by a relentless certainty:

This clutching life, it ever groundward bends us,

makes us routine’s hostage; how watchfully it tends us.



Part of a poem about a predatory male:

You were not to be trusted or believed,

even when hooded and trussed

unless your ravenous hunger

had already been sated

with a meat raw and bloody.



Such exsanguinations had to be effected personally:

flesh rendered by others

was, even at the very moment of death,

already too old to be touched.

You were fastidious.

It’s no secret that I am a sucker for that which makes me look at reality in new and shining ways. This chapbook does that, and I will re-read it on cold winter nights, as a source of warmth.

Hummingbirds don’t fly south for the winter. They just freeze where they are in the air, mistaken for speckles of winter sunlight, or, sometimes, low-hanging stars.

And as we all know at Abyss & Apex, prayer causes stars.

[Erin Emily]

I loved this book! Favourite poems include ‘Hummingbird Hagiography,’ ‘Poets and other Birds of Prey,’ ‘Black as Bees,’ and ‘The Bloody Chamber.’ This book is full of fairytales and lore and birds. A perfect combination.

[Carla]

A neat collection of poems, mostly to do with birds, but also man and nature. Fanciful and fun, dark and mysterious, this book has a little bit of everything. I've neglected poetry reading but felt drawn to this book when I saw it in a bookstore and enjoyed every one.

[Jessie B.]

A lovely collection of poems

[Saudah]

<3

[Derek Newman-Stille]

In her poetry collection Come Late to the Love of Birds, Sandra Kasturi creates a spectral reality, an assemblage of words that makes the familiar strange and the strange familiar. She reveals the extraordinary in the natural, taking scenes of everyday life and introducing an otherworldly quality, a nuance of language and image that breaks down the notions of what is real.

The figure of the bird provides a framework for this strange-making process, an animal that is both fundamentally natural and present, but also simultaneously distant, ethereal, coded with otherworldly flights of fancy. She fixes the reader with the animal gaze, a gaze that is both common and completely Other, and that gaze finds humanity wanting. She helps to estrange us from our hegemonic ideas of humanity – our belief that we are superior to nature – and makes the reader question their taken-for-granted beliefs about the appropriateness of their impact on the environment.

If you are interested in reading a longer version of this review, you can explore it on my website at http://speculatingcanada.wordpress.co...

[Maya]

Poetry about birds appeals to me greatly, as a bird lover. But there's more than just birds in Sandra Kasturi's Come Late to the Love of Birds. Among the nature themed poems are whimsical 21st century reflections and re-imaginings of mythology. While not as dark as Sylvia Plath or Sharon Olds, Kasturi's complex imagery couldn't help but remind me of them.

My two favourite poems would be Lark, and the Seussian A Man in His Car, Beside His Beautiful Wife.