Louder Birds

by Angela Voras-Hills

Angela Voras­-Hills’s Louder Birds , her debut collection of poetry, is a beautiful study of the natural world, motherhood, and the inherent desire for meaning. This collection of complex lyric poems holds a haunting absence at its center, an absence that is “impossible to navigate.” Yet Voras-­Hills presses on, untangling the distinctions that surround her (human and animal, domestic and wild) with both bravery and respect. She writes, “The boundaries between home and the road / are it’s impossible to navigate this landscape. / We’ve all been in the presence of something dark / and have chosen not to seek shelter.” As the poet hones in on naming the void, her surroundings grow more threatening―but not once does she surrender or turn back. Voras-­Hills’s poems are smart enough to know the distinctions themselves are tenuous at best, and wise enough to know that we must always pay our dues to the world beyond our door. Wondrous, ruminative, and revelatory, Louder Birds is a collection that is not to be missed.

Genres: Poetry

80 pages, Paperback

Published February 15, 2020

Reviews

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

In LOUDER BIRDS Voras-Hills doesn’t shy away from the difficult or unsettling image, emotion, or idea — and yet there is a subtlety to the way she approaches everything difficult and unsettling. The poet has an incisive perspective missing from a good deal of contemporary poetry — she is never precious or sentimental about the death or brutality she witnesses in the landscape or people around her — but she is not without sympathy or empathy for those dying or brutalized, the suffering, acknowledging that in one way or another we are all suffering, that we all wait “for some small light to find us.”

Poems I liked especially: “Controlled Burn,” “Unfurling,” “Muss Es Sein? Es Muss Sein!” “Persona,” “Wait In the Bathtub and It Will Carry You,” and “Rabbit in the Road.”

[Kate Gaskin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Angela Voras-Hills' debut book of poetry Louder Birds is a gorgeous tribute to place and the domestic ecstasies and mundanities of family. In her words, "If the day's not picked apart / first by the bills / of louder birds, / I will tear into it like bread." I particularly enjoyed Voras-Hills' vivid evocation of the Upper Midwest, a place of grasses, fields, rabbits, old barns, birds, hayflies, spiders, and roaming house cats. This is an evocative and lovely collection, restless in its desire to observe the shifting nature of home: "The boundaries between home and the road // are insecure: it's impossible to navigate this landscape. / We've all been in the presence of something dark // and have chosen not to seek shelter..." I highly recommend this book both for its darkness and its light!

[Violeta · Rating 4 out of 5]

Angela Voras-Hills is so great at line breaks and haunting poetry of place. Be warned that this is not uplifting nature poetry; most of the nature imagery ranges from unsettling to disturbing. I may have not picked this title up right now if I had known that going in.

That said, I admire Voras-Hills’ poetic prowess and the cohesiveness of this collection. Stand-out poems for me included: “Retrospective,” “Preserving,” “Never Eat a Polar Bear’s Liver,” and “Self-Portrait of a Cat Trapped in a Motel Room.”

[Maryfrances · Rating 5 out of 5]

Louder Birds by Angela Voras-Hills is an engaging book of poems about place with startling detail on the darker side. As she says in "Retrospective," "We've all been in the presence of somthing dark/and have chosen not to seek shelter." The setting of the upper Midwest comes through in the details with farmhouses, barns, wild rabbits and children in "Preserving" who throw toads into the pond thinking they are frogs "And we can't blame them for not knowing wha swims, what sinks, what floats." Many of the poems are unsettling and stark, but they are poems not easily forgotten. This book is well worth the read.

[Zuska · Rating 3 out of 5]

There were remarkable poems in this collection that made me glad I own it. But there were far too many poems that seemed, to me, overly obscure. Still, time spent with a volume of poetry is never time wasted. Glad I read it.

[Caroline · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gorgeous, bodily poems filled not just with birds but so many other animals (and yes, roadkill on these poems’ dirt roads and country highways, too). These are deeply rooted in their midwestern landscape and utterly satisfying.

[McKenzie Tozan · Rating 5 out of 5]

From the first moment I stepped into Angela Voras-Hills’ collection, Louder Birds, I knew I was in the presence of something vital.

The collection opens with the particularly captivating poem, “Retrospective,” which immediately impressed upon me the need to sit back and “listen” to the work. The first two poems involve multiple images of ambulances or sirens, which set the sound for the collection early. This, strangely enough, made me think of large emergency vehicles (like ambulances or even helicopters) as the “louder birds” of the collection, set against a mostly rural and domestic backdrop.

This implies, too, the need for louder birds—or emergency assistance. In the opening poem, Voras-Hills also observes, “We’ve all been in the presence of something dark” (1). Not only is this statement foreboding, and creates a particularly physical presence for the louder birds, but it also promises to illuminate some of those darker moments we may experience across the collection. In all of this, Voras-Hills does not disappoint.

You can read the rest of my review at GREEN MOUNTAINS REVIEW: https://greenmountainsreview.com/poet...