Murmurations

by Annick MacAskill

Murmurations is a collection of love poems that explores how intimacy tests the capacity of language—how music is also noise and the prospect for miscommunication abounds. Populating her poems with birdsong and murmurings of the natural world, MacAskill highlights how poets and lovers share much with birders on the twitch, how even keen observation and intense passion can fail us as we pursue our beloved across distances and through time. Yet when we do finally find love it often seems, like a rare bird, “at once/singular and improbable/because of how clearly it appeared to us.”

Genres: Poetry, Canada

96 pages, Paperback

Published April 16, 2020

About the author

Annick MacAskill was the winner of a 2022 Governor General’s Literary Award for her poetry collection Shadow Blight. In the fall of 2024, she published her fourth full-length poetry book, Votive. Her previous collections include Murmurations, No Meeting Without Body, and two chapbooks—Brotherly Love: Poems of Sappho and Charaxos and five from hem. MacAskill is a member of Room Magazine’s Growing Room Collective and publisher of micropress Opaat Press. She lives in Kjipuktuk/Halifax, NS.

Reviews

[Chelsea M · Rating 5 out of 5]

Just lovely! And to be honest I learned some neat words as well. It's not a surprise that I liked this, since it's local and full of birds...the most interesting thing to see as a poet is how much use MacAskill makes of line and stanza breaks, it shows an attention to craft that is really inspiring.

[Hannah Brown · Rating 5 out of 5]

Annick MacAskill's Murmurations is a beautiful book. It's physically beautiful, beautifully made, French flaps, lovely paper— but it is also a beautiful book because it takes the reader on a flight through neighborhoods and the birds who sing there, and it does so as it maps the migration of love and longing, full of feeling and also, sometimes, happy pride, as in these lines, when she's asked how long before her lover arrives: "three hundred and sixteen/You count the hours? Baby/ if she saw you, she would know."

[Margaryta · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do not usually think about the pacing of a poetry collection because they tend to feel more thematically organized assemblages of individual pieces. Murmurations read like a mural, where the reader's eye is moving between foreground and background but never fully breaking away from the central "narrative". MacAskill's words are intimate in a very inviting way. I felt like I was transported into a small but comforting space every time I picked up Murmurations. I had a strong affective response to many of the images and enjoyed seeing the magpies and starlings reappear throughout the collection. Murmurations is soothing in the best possible way.

[K.R. Wilson · Rating 4 out of 5]

Murmurations is a gorgeous artifact, with its creamy, textured pages and its cover like rich Victorian endpapers. Inside, its poems are heavy with the pleasures of the senses and the liturgies of the body, with absence and longing and starlings. They evoke moments and places so precisely we almost feel we’ve lived them ourselves.

[stephanie roberts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Now we live in the same city and still I feel like I'm running. You ask me what I'm looking for. And what are you looking for? [...] We ask our questions, voices these incessant calls, pests labouring against time, inverting, calendars, zodiac signs. Trailing the sounds of our longing—

[Jade Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'm not particularly drawn to poems about relationships these days, but MacAskill defies the tired expectations of the lyric love poem and crafts something both endotic and deeply moving.