The Warbler Road

by Merrill Gilfillan

Literary Nonfiction. Nature Writing. In these twenty-six short essays, Merrill Gilfillan records his encounters with Wood Warblers as they flit through North American landscapes on their migratory paths. With precision, appetite, and a touch of whimsy, he sketches the tiny birds in their surroundings, perfecting the art of what he elsewhere calls "alfresco writing." Throughout, THE WARBLER ROAD testifies to birding as a meditative, even votive dedication and a fundamental mode of attention to the "When I walk out with binoculars in May and September, it is often the fly fisherman in Yeats's poem I have in mind as I move along the path. We are both out to discover and authenticate the morning, to break the glaze of habitude and mark, for an hour or so, the weave and fine points of the season and its day-in-place." As Peter Matthiessen writes, "A bird book for poets, precisely and evocatively observed, beautifully written. Would that such a eulogy existed for every family of birds."

Genres: Nonfiction

192 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2010

Reviews

[Sean Meagher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is a series of short, journal-like vignettes, each describing a different experience over a lifetime of bird watching. Often, nothing much happens. Gilfillan travels, hikes, sees birds, and sometimes doesn’t see birds. Sometime she meets people, and their interactions range from passing to commonplace. The entries are written with such delicate beauty that the collection almost amounts to a massive poem. Without any detectable pretension, Gilfillan mixes his recounting of birds with startling, haunting imagery. Amongst the hundreds of descriptions of birds both seen and hoped-to-be seen, Gilfillan makes us contemplate the archaeological implications of a lost hunting knife. He turns a familiar stump on a favorite trail into a beloved old friend. He makes us keenly aware that each of us is the final keeper of some faraway memories that will some day be gone from existence. There is no mention of conservation; no cloying plea to “get out and experience nature!!!!!” These are simple experiences, lovingly and perfectly expressed, that amount to some of the most unassuming and miraculous nature writing you are bound to find. I struggled to read this at night, as each page beckoned me to step outside, head to the woods, and take a look at all there is to see.

[Mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

"...the art of warblering can take on the stature of aesthetic pilgrimage."

"But all told, wherever you might be standing, a day with warblers in its rigging is a beneficent, more intricate day."

Warblers rejoice and reunite! In these short essays, the author documents his encounters with warblers, both in his home state of Ohio and on his visits to Colorado, during several migratory seasons. The author is smart, observant and is a die-hard birder. He is also a poet and this comes through in his lovely prose. This may not be for all readers, but if you appreciate the great outdoors, you might enjoy this slim volume. I know, I would definitely like to have a beer with this guy.

[Dsimpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Is bird watching quaint? Tepid? Nerdy? Well, maybe. But Mr. Gilfillan is an aesthete and a writer of fine sentences. He is also very knowledgeable about US geographies of various kinds. He has a self-effacing humor a bit like Thoreau's. Reading him (not just this book) one can start to see why birds (literal birds) have mattered so much to poetry and to human aspiration in general. And reading him one also gets interesting glimpses into various marginal peoples and their odd little towns. Hobos, American Indians, and outsiders of various stripes make appearances amid starlings, cowbirds, chokecherry...

Reading Gilfillan makes me want to get outside, perhaps back to Quail Hollow (a park where i spent a lot of time as a kid).

One thing that academic people might find interesting is that even though Gilfillan is totally unapologetic about more or less constantly pursuing beauty, leisure, and pleasure, I think he's largely immured from various angles of Adornian severity. Gilfillan's "critque" is not the ruthlessly negative variety of the Frankfurt School. It consists in an affirmative practice of loving attention and concern, an abiding in the given natural world.

One last point. Gilfillan treats the flora and fauna, the buttes and escarpments, the little outings amid small, ostensibly insignificant Birds and Rivers (another recent book) as what M. Scott Momaday has called "mnemonic pegs." Momaday was referring to a columnar mountain that plains Indians called Devil's Tower. The idea is that attentive living among natural forms provides a structure for the arrangement and preservation of memories. Gilfillan is always saying things like, "Traditionally, I visit X River every few years," and he frequently remembers other visits and other bird sightings and the like. Abstractly speaking, these modest sites warrant revisiting both due to their intrinsic merits and due to the fact that recurrent visitations lend a richly textured fabric to one's existence.

[Jeff · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Warbler Road tells about birding, a very specific form of dolce far niente, and one it's easy to be quite passionate about. Gilfillan does something that could have been done in the forties -- and I don't mean just the nineteen forties. How does one characterize the being-lost-in-an-activity recorded here?

[David Robertson · Rating 4 out of 5]

In this collection of 26 short essays, master stylist Gilfillan examines the habitats haunted by wood warblers all across North America. Less about the individual birds and more about the places where they can be found, these essays are engaging accounts of Gilfillan's travels to observe and enjoy the birds. About half the essays deal with locations east of the Mississippi (the warbler heartland) and half consider locations west of the Mississippi. The essays set in the East (where Gilfillan came of age and serve as much of his inspiration) are more engaging than those set in the West, but they are all very, very good. This is not Gilfillan's best book of prose (I think Chokecherry Places is that book), but this is a fine, nuanced, collection.

Gilfillan's preface may contain some of the best writing in the book. On page xiv, he writes: When I was thirty-five, I moved to the American West and have lived here ever since. Each spring as I loiter near a Colorado stream, I find myself recalling, in involuntary bits and glints, May mornings in Ohio when the Dendroica warblers were moving through. Drifting west, looking back east over one's shoulder, is an entrenched American pattern of at least six or eight generations. The very symmetrical structure of the pattern lends itself to myth and nostalgia, even folk song: past versus present, youth versus maturity, living faces versus missing ones, dense forest versus wind-swept ponderosa plateau. But when one realizes, having engaged the birds, that the richness and numbers of warbler movements back east consistently trump the same phenomenon west of the Great Plains, the dynamic is given another dimension and the gazing eastwardly an added luster.

[Patty Simpson · Rating 4 out of 5]

3.5 stars rounded up. Written for birders, by a poet. I suspect I would not enjoy his poetry, but the style suits the subject matter.

[David Rudin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hands down this is my favorite book of his. There are snippets in some of his other books of non-fiction essays that I enjoy, but I think he is at his best when discussing warblers. His passion for birds, how he views them as an integral part of the landscape, of a place, provides a totally unique perspective. The economic use and careful choice of words come from his background as a poet. A wonderful communicator of the sublime moment, he is able to find a perspective both vast and artful. He is the master of transcending the ordinary simply by assuming a point a view that connects the event to the greatest aspirations of human aesthetic appreciation.

[Shelf Magazine]

Read an excerpt in the April/May 2011 issue of Shelf. http://www.shelfmediagroup.com/staff_...