Bird & Forest

by Brent Cunningham

Poetry. "BIRD & FOREST is clear, beautiful writing. There is a simple quality of the well-told-tale to these fractured fables. This a patient, wise and hilarious work whose intimate tone insinuates itself into your psyche only to have its way with you and then suddenly vanish. What more could you want?"--Laura Moriarty. Brent Cunningham's work has appeared in CHAIN, LIPSTICK ELEVEN, Radical Society, KENNING, Encyclopedia, and elsewhere.

Genres: Poetry

104 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2005

Reviews

[Alex · Rating 1 out of 5]

This was a bit of a combination of poetry and prose, which is to say that the occasional poetry read as prose would, and the more common prose was arranged as a poem might. And dense prose it was... every other line reeked of pretention, and when I could translate what it was he was trying to say, the ideas were too simple to warrant the bombast. Granted, halfway through the second section, from which the collection took its title, I just stopped trying... there are only so many ways you can make a bird flying through a forest into a metaphor. One star for the sake of one interesting piece, the occasional interesting line, and a cool design.

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Thirteenth Oration (On the Perfect-Satire-Poetics of Trillius Patrionius)

Dear audience members of “The Orations of Trillius Patrionius” in Bird & Forest by Brent Cunningham, stop this day and night with me to talk in “Faulty Parallels” about the ways in which statements on poetry and its clipped-winged analogue, reality, can occur as self-reflexive perfect-satires of empires and “tyrannizer”[s]. As community philosophers, fellow citizens, our views on language must always be pre-determined toward—

“How tempting to lecture you on signs and calculations.”

What time-talkers we are! Let us not forget the backward descent of the birds that take flight on the manifold’s cover, traversing the off-limit spine, arriving, at last, to the world’s dark side of the moon, at the base of a tree, toward its roots. The word “radical” comes from “root”: “some words endure.”

“My dear others,” I challenge you to find comfort in these “The Orations of Trillius Patrionius” as helmet or ego, when, lifted slightly off the outraged skull, an incoherent “management” gleams. I deplore you to speak to this book, make a poem, on the porch, under the sun, which does not sea.

“Things are different now.” “In short, let us try to reason together.” Ladies and gentlemen.

Why are the birds back-tracking? Is everything old really new?

[C.A. · Rating 5 out of 5]

When this book first came out I was with a friend at BLUE STOCKINGS Bookshop in NYC. It was one of those handsome looking (STRIKING actually!) books that makes you WANT to pick it up and check it out. I didn't have enough money at the time to buy myself a copy, but once I started reading it I was TAKEN OVER! It was one of those rare exciting moments where a book insisted I surrender myself to reading the whole book in one sitting. The poems kept coming to mind in the following week to the point that as soon as I had another paycheck I bought a copy. I had to! My favorite books are the ones that INSIST I buy them! This is one!

CAConrad
http://CAConrad.blogspot.com

[Rodney · Rating 5 out of 5]

In these elegant parables of a self relating to the strangeness of the world in time, Cunningham manages to question the conventional ground of the lyric while indulging in some of its most enduring pleasures. My favorite section, "The Orations of Trillius Patronius," set the stage for the entire book: the poet mounts the dais in the person of an imaginary Roman orator to address his public with an assortment of private observations, absurd, sententious musings, and dreamy asides: "I desired to speak however my heart wished./And now look: maybe it wasn't a great idea." O yes it was.