Hummingbirds Between the Pages

by Chris Arthur

In his latest collection, Hummingbirds Between the Pages, prizewinning Irish essayist Chris Arthur muses on subjects ranging from Charles Darwin’s killing of a South American fox to the carnal music sounding in a statue of the Buddha, from how Egyptian seashells contain echoes of World War II to a child’s first encounter with death. Whether he’s looking at skipping stones, old photographs, butterflies, the resonance of a remembered phrase, or being questioned at an army checkpoint during Northern Ireland’s Troubles, what gives these unorthodox meditations their appeal is the way in which—with striking lyricism—they tap into unexpected seams of meaning and mystery in our everyday terrain. Arthur explores the moments that have left him spellbound, tying his own experiences as a young boy from Ulster who saw his first hummingbirds in London to the wonder felt by early settlers to America who sent pressed hummingbirds across the ocean to the communities they had left behind. Through rumination on the seemingly quotidian, Arthur’s lyrical prose exposes new layers of possibility just beneath the surface of the expected.

Genres: Essays

264 pages, Kindle Edition

Published July 24, 2018

Reviews

[Heather Durham · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the sort of essay collection that I want to hand to someone who wonders what an essay can do, where it can go, and whether any of that would be worth their time. It is! It did take time to fully absorb these, to follow all the twists and turns of this author's curious and articulate mind – each sentence so full– and to pause to rest my own mind now and then. But as the highlighting and underlining in my copy indicates, I gleaned so many new ways to see my world, to make sense of my own experiences through different eyes. This is the reason I read essays. The reason I read anything, really. As Chris Arthur himself states in his Afterword, "An essay richly complicates the commonplace, revealing mazes of meaning coiled within the mundane." Now jubilantly through this particular maze, I'm confident that if/when I read it again, I will discover different passageways, new meanings. I discovered this book through Mad Creek Books' presence at the Portland A.W.P. conference, and I'm so glad I did!

[Areeb Ahmad (Bankrupt_Bookworm) · Rating 3 out of 5]

RTC.


(I received a finished copy from the publisher in exchange for an honest review.)