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The Bird-While
"A Bird-while. In a natural chronometer, a Bird-while may be admitted as one of the metres, since the space most of the wild birds will allow you to make your observations on them when they alight near you in the woods, is a pretty equal and familiar measure" (Ralph Waldo Emerson's Journal, 1838). Without becoming didactic or pedantic about the spiritual metaphor hidden in the concept of the "bird-while," Keith Taylor's collection evokes certain Eastern meditative poets who often wrote in an aphoristic style of the spirit or the mind mirroring specific aspects of the natural world.
The Bird-while is a collection of forty-nine poems that meditate on the nature-both human and non-human-that surrounds us daily. Taylor is in the company of naturalist poets such as Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver-poets who often drew from an Emersonian sensibility to create art that awakens the mind to its corresponding truths in the natural world. The book ranges from the longer poem to the eight line, unrhymed stanza similar to that of the T'ang poet Han-Shan. And without section breaks to reinforce the passing of time, the collection creates greater fluidity of movement from one poem to the next, as if there is no beginning or end, only an eternal moment that is suspended on the page. Tom Pohrt's original illustrations are scattered throughout the text, adding a stunning visual element to the already vivid language. The book moves from the author's travel accounts to the destruction of the natural world, even species extinction, to more hopeful poems of survival and the return of wildness. The natural rhythm is at times marred by the disturbances of the twenty-first century that come blaring into these meditations, as when a National Guard jet rumbles over the treeline upsetting a hummingbird, and yet, even the hummingbird is able to regain its balance and continue as before. At its core, Taylor's collection is a reminder of Emerson's idea that natural facts are symbols of spiritual facts.
These well-crafted poems will be easily accessible to any literary audience, with a more particular attraction to readers of contemporary poetry sensitive to the marriage of an Eastern sensibility with contemporary American settings and scenes.
The Bird-while is a collection of forty-nine poems that meditate on the nature-both human and non-human-that surrounds us daily. Taylor is in the company of naturalist poets such as Gary Snyder and Mary Oliver-poets who often drew from an Emersonian sensibility to create art that awakens the mind to its corresponding truths in the natural world. The book ranges from the longer poem to the eight line, unrhymed stanza similar to that of the T'ang poet Han-Shan. And without section breaks to reinforce the passing of time, the collection creates greater fluidity of movement from one poem to the next, as if there is no beginning or end, only an eternal moment that is suspended on the page. Tom Pohrt's original illustrations are scattered throughout the text, adding a stunning visual element to the already vivid language. The book moves from the author's travel accounts to the destruction of the natural world, even species extinction, to more hopeful poems of survival and the return of wildness. The natural rhythm is at times marred by the disturbances of the twenty-first century that come blaring into these meditations, as when a National Guard jet rumbles over the treeline upsetting a hummingbird, and yet, even the hummingbird is able to regain its balance and continue as before. At its core, Taylor's collection is a reminder of Emerson's idea that natural facts are symbols of spiritual facts.
These well-crafted poems will be easily accessible to any literary audience, with a more particular attraction to readers of contemporary poetry sensitive to the marriage of an Eastern sensibility with contemporary American settings and scenes.
- GenresPoetry
176 pages, Paperback
Published February 6, 2017
2 people are currently reading
25 people want to read
About the author
Keith Taylor
20 books90 followersKeith Taylor was born in British Columbia in 1952. He spent his childhood in Alberta and his adolescence in Indiana. After several years of traveling, he moved to Michigan, where he earned his M.A. in English at Central Michigan University. He has worked as a camp-boy for a hunting outfitter in the Yukon, as a dishwasher in southern France, a housepainter in Indiana and Ireland, a freight handler, a teacher, a freelance writer, the co-host of a radio talk show, and as the night attendant at a pinball arcade in California. For more than twenty years he worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then he taught in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Michigan, and directed the Bear River Writers Conference. From 2010–2018 he worked as the Poetry Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. He retired from the University of Michigan in 2018. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor; they have one daughter.
Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.
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Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews
April 10, 2025
I really really liked this collection. It deserves more acclaim. Fortunately DeWitt Clinton wrote a great review and i hope they never correct this:
Keith Richards in the act of writing The Bird-While.
many thanks to DeepAI.org for the visual.
On the other hand, if you haven’t taken a walk with Keith Richards lately, you might enjoy his more peaceful, reflective meditations on creatures of the earth he has come to visit, or sometimes the creatures are replaced by dazzling memories of walking through art museums.
Keith Richards in the act of writing The Bird-While.many thanks to DeepAI.org for the visual.
May 5, 2020
Review
Keith Taylor, Ecstatic Destinations ( Alice Green & Co., Ann Arbor, 2018), unpaginated
Keith Taylor, The Bird-while (Wayne State UP, Detroit, 2017) 79 pp.
Though I’ve been chased by a startled black bear in upstate New York, and have conversed with turkey buzzards on the way to work, spotted beautiful red foxes, and stood in awe when whooping cranes swept over my gaze, and have been thrilled to hear Canadian geese honking away, most of the time I’m just walking back home from errands, or chores, or a brief walk to stay healthy.
On the other hand, if you haven’t taken a walk with Keith Richards lately, you might enjoy his more peaceful, reflective meditations on creatures of the earth he has come to visit, or sometimes the creatures are replaced by dazzling memories of walking through art museums.
His recent collections of poetry, Ecstatic Destinations and The Bird-While would be an excellent panacea to help us through our most self-isolated period of history since the 1918 flu epidemic. I might qualify that a bit by adding I’ve been reading his collections in a sunny living room while outside the Corona Virus is creating a hell on earth for so many different communities and countries. Here’s why is poetry is so refreshing in these times: his lyrics are not long epics, nor are they particularly developed through narrative voices, but instead, we have a quiet, calming, even peaceful writer who is taking us outside (or inside with trips to different painting, exhibits in museums) to help us renew our sense with not necessarily wild nature, but nature we can observe in case we have to “stay in.”
Ecstatic Destinations is a collection of 21 short reflections of quiet walks around his neighborhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he even dedicates the volume to his neighbors and neighborhood. Two neighbors in the neighborhood “clip the plants below their seedpods/ forcing a generosity of display that stops me, / for the pleasure and perfume of it, / all season long.” These lines seem to capture the poetic spirit of these poems, even if some of the selections are not necessarily observations of gardening or transplanting.
Sometimes the observation is the brief moment of a monarch making its way through a local baseball park: “Exquisite, the loneliness/ of baseball diamonds at midday, /flags fluttering above plastic toilets, / a single Monarch flitting south/ down the third base line.” But not all of his observations are so pastoral as in his meditation about too many deer: “The city wants to cull the herd--/ too many gardens are losing/dogwoods and redbuds/clipped to the ground over winter;” Later in the sonnet we learn “the city plans to give the meat away.” This small collection is a joy to remember, and one that might relieve some of the frustration these months for staying inside too long just to stay alive.
The second collection, published a year earlier, is an eight-part collection of poems all written in the context of the natural world phenomena of “bird-while,” an observation of the natural world first noted by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1838. As an experiment in Reader-Response Theory, I’m reading the last poem first, and the first last, for reasons I can’t quite explain. The last poem, “Acolytes in the Bird-while,” closes with “…that one/immeasurable moment at sunset/when we count their glowing bills/among our fragile, vanishing gifts” (74). These lines summarize perfectly Taylor’s collection, as if the entire arrangement of poems becomes an introduction to that rarefied love of bird watching, often with binoculars, but here with vivid imagery and breathtaking lines.
Toward the end of The Bird-while is a 14-part, eight-line meditation on the joy of observing natural history that includes lake studies, as well as a keen eye for botanical, aviary, trees, fish, and of course observations of local creatures from field mice to camels. One clue as to why Taylor has become so immersed in the natural world may be his experiences with the University of Michigan Biological Station. His “field notes” are certainly grounded in much of his “bird-while” notations such as in “Bird Rescue”: The grebe was light/in my hands. It’s hollow bones/felt delicate, breakable, /until a wing flapped against me, /strong and longing for flight” (49-50).
But not all of Taylor’s poems cover the living as a few are remarkable studies of “mounted specimens” as in his poem “One Species to Mourn,” “The glass eyes of the stuffed birds, /brown or red or made from sparkling buttons/reflect us back to ourselves” (30). It’s almost as if this avian poet has helped us to see more distinctly and more colorfully the world of nature we so often take for granted in our walks, or hikes or wherever we might be in full view of nature.
In “Mapping the River,” we see how the Huron River offers up the occasional remains of someone who floated not on a raft, but probably wit the flotsam and jetsam that a river always promises, sooner or later: “The dead would hang up in the rushes/ or on the grey-brown log snags, often/disappearing under snow and ice, / their bones scattered and gone by breakup” (16).
Of all the sections of the collection that are a surprise, the first 11 poems are grounded in travels around the world, mostly in Europe and India where he recalls moments in Paris, in London at the British Museum, selecting flowers in Toulouse, walking in the evening light in Copenhagen, and ending with a disturbing but perhaps common image of a dying sacred cow near Bharatpur in India.
Taylor’s collection is also one of the natural wonders, including keen observations of our natural world, and a reminder that the world can be so restorative, even restful, especially if you are an urban reader who more typically views nature from the television or computer screen. So get out there if you can, and take a notebook, like Keith Taylor has.
Keith Taylor, Ecstatic Destinations ( Alice Green & Co., Ann Arbor, 2018), unpaginated
Keith Taylor, The Bird-while (Wayne State UP, Detroit, 2017) 79 pp.
Though I’ve been chased by a startled black bear in upstate New York, and have conversed with turkey buzzards on the way to work, spotted beautiful red foxes, and stood in awe when whooping cranes swept over my gaze, and have been thrilled to hear Canadian geese honking away, most of the time I’m just walking back home from errands, or chores, or a brief walk to stay healthy.
On the other hand, if you haven’t taken a walk with Keith Richards lately, you might enjoy his more peaceful, reflective meditations on creatures of the earth he has come to visit, or sometimes the creatures are replaced by dazzling memories of walking through art museums.
His recent collections of poetry, Ecstatic Destinations and The Bird-While would be an excellent panacea to help us through our most self-isolated period of history since the 1918 flu epidemic. I might qualify that a bit by adding I’ve been reading his collections in a sunny living room while outside the Corona Virus is creating a hell on earth for so many different communities and countries. Here’s why is poetry is so refreshing in these times: his lyrics are not long epics, nor are they particularly developed through narrative voices, but instead, we have a quiet, calming, even peaceful writer who is taking us outside (or inside with trips to different painting, exhibits in museums) to help us renew our sense with not necessarily wild nature, but nature we can observe in case we have to “stay in.”
Ecstatic Destinations is a collection of 21 short reflections of quiet walks around his neighborhood in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and he even dedicates the volume to his neighbors and neighborhood. Two neighbors in the neighborhood “clip the plants below their seedpods/ forcing a generosity of display that stops me, / for the pleasure and perfume of it, / all season long.” These lines seem to capture the poetic spirit of these poems, even if some of the selections are not necessarily observations of gardening or transplanting.
Sometimes the observation is the brief moment of a monarch making its way through a local baseball park: “Exquisite, the loneliness/ of baseball diamonds at midday, /flags fluttering above plastic toilets, / a single Monarch flitting south/ down the third base line.” But not all of his observations are so pastoral as in his meditation about too many deer: “The city wants to cull the herd--/ too many gardens are losing/dogwoods and redbuds/clipped to the ground over winter;” Later in the sonnet we learn “the city plans to give the meat away.” This small collection is a joy to remember, and one that might relieve some of the frustration these months for staying inside too long just to stay alive.
The second collection, published a year earlier, is an eight-part collection of poems all written in the context of the natural world phenomena of “bird-while,” an observation of the natural world first noted by Ralph Waldo Emerson in 1838. As an experiment in Reader-Response Theory, I’m reading the last poem first, and the first last, for reasons I can’t quite explain. The last poem, “Acolytes in the Bird-while,” closes with “…that one/immeasurable moment at sunset/when we count their glowing bills/among our fragile, vanishing gifts” (74). These lines summarize perfectly Taylor’s collection, as if the entire arrangement of poems becomes an introduction to that rarefied love of bird watching, often with binoculars, but here with vivid imagery and breathtaking lines.
Toward the end of The Bird-while is a 14-part, eight-line meditation on the joy of observing natural history that includes lake studies, as well as a keen eye for botanical, aviary, trees, fish, and of course observations of local creatures from field mice to camels. One clue as to why Taylor has become so immersed in the natural world may be his experiences with the University of Michigan Biological Station. His “field notes” are certainly grounded in much of his “bird-while” notations such as in “Bird Rescue”: The grebe was light/in my hands. It’s hollow bones/felt delicate, breakable, /until a wing flapped against me, /strong and longing for flight” (49-50).
But not all of Taylor’s poems cover the living as a few are remarkable studies of “mounted specimens” as in his poem “One Species to Mourn,” “The glass eyes of the stuffed birds, /brown or red or made from sparkling buttons/reflect us back to ourselves” (30). It’s almost as if this avian poet has helped us to see more distinctly and more colorfully the world of nature we so often take for granted in our walks, or hikes or wherever we might be in full view of nature.
In “Mapping the River,” we see how the Huron River offers up the occasional remains of someone who floated not on a raft, but probably wit the flotsam and jetsam that a river always promises, sooner or later: “The dead would hang up in the rushes/ or on the grey-brown log snags, often/disappearing under snow and ice, / their bones scattered and gone by breakup” (16).
Of all the sections of the collection that are a surprise, the first 11 poems are grounded in travels around the world, mostly in Europe and India where he recalls moments in Paris, in London at the British Museum, selecting flowers in Toulouse, walking in the evening light in Copenhagen, and ending with a disturbing but perhaps common image of a dying sacred cow near Bharatpur in India.
Taylor’s collection is also one of the natural wonders, including keen observations of our natural world, and a reminder that the world can be so restorative, even restful, especially if you are an urban reader who more typically views nature from the television or computer screen. So get out there if you can, and take a notebook, like Keith Taylor has.
December 22, 2018
I've loved Keith Taylor's poetry for a long time. He transports me with his distilled and generous vision. THE BIRD-WHILE is magnificent. It features range and depth. It is saturated in wisdom, a clear-eyed witnessing of the natural world that is awash in delight and awe. These poems are beautiful. They were also, for me, necessary. I could feel the scales falling from my eyes as I read in wonder.
September 14, 2024
I love this collection. The poems in it are like freshwater: crisp, meditative, and transient. My favorite pieces are "Summer Teaching"; "All I'm Trying to Do"; "BANFF: Running Away"; "Sign"; "The Criticism of My French Poems"; and "A Return."
The illustrations are nice, but I don't think they add much. Most of the time I didn't notice them, and when I did, their black and white line-work didn't seem to flow with the color and texture of these poems.
The illustrations are nice, but I don't think they add much. Most of the time I didn't notice them, and when I did, their black and white line-work didn't seem to flow with the color and texture of these poems.
October 14, 2020
I enjoy Taylor's poetry for many reasons, including its references to environs of the Great Lakes. Was little disappointed to see a handful of poems in this book that also appear on other collections of his work that I already own.
June 5, 2017
Beautiful!
June 10, 2017
"i was young enough to believe that if something felt significant it probably was."
this collection is kind of magical. the poems are about reality, sure, but they read like dreams, whimsical and nostalgic. at times, i thought they were hauntingly sad. my personal favorites: "the collections in london," "sea and rain," and "castle nowhere."
keith taylor is a professor at my university, so i was especially happy that i enjoyed this book so much. it was lovely to see michigan highlighted in some of the poems!
this collection is kind of magical. the poems are about reality, sure, but they read like dreams, whimsical and nostalgic. at times, i thought they were hauntingly sad. my personal favorites: "the collections in london," "sea and rain," and "castle nowhere."
keith taylor is a professor at my university, so i was especially happy that i enjoyed this book so much. it was lovely to see michigan highlighted in some of the poems!
May 17, 2018
Natural. Beautiful. Awe-inspiring.
Displaying 1 - 8 of 8 reviews