Rivers & Birds

by Merrill Gilfillan

Such a fine writer is Merrill Gilfillan that the urge to simply quote at length from his books is difficult to stifle. The line between poetry and essay, the two forms in which he writes, seems negligible, so keen and true are his observations. The Bloomsbury Review

Pitch-perfect observation . . . Gilfillan's love for both wing and water is on display in his highly evocative prose.Boulder Daily Camera

138 pages, Paperback

First published August 1, 2003

Reviews

[Patricia · Rating 4 out of 5]

"At a certain age, it is not so difficult to imagine a decision to gauge the accumulative valence of one's being by the number of moments passed near singing thrushes . . ."
As Gilfillan points out thrush song is "a test of metaphor."
His metaphors in "Swamp Angels" manage to conjure up a sense of the song and brought back some exultant moments of hearing thrushes on the back of Timp in June. I'd put those in a list of moments well lived.

[David Robertson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Probably Gilfillan's second best collection of essays (after his best, "Chokecherry Places.") Instead of restricting himself to the Great Plains as he does in "Chokecherry Places," Gilfillan ranges widely in this collection of essays that loosely embraces birds and rivers. His travels include Plum Island off the coast of northeastern Massachusetts; the Catskills in New York; the Mississippi River in Iowa, Illinois, and Missouri; and sundry locations in the West. I have to agree with Jim Harrison, quoted on the back cover of the book, who writes, "If anyone writes better prose in American, I am unaware of it." The best essay in the collection may be "Swamp Angels" (about listening to thrushes), but I was also captivated by "Going Back in May," a recollection of Gilfillan's return to Mt. Gilead, Ohio, where he was born and raised. (I have to admit that I may have been partial to this essay because I, too, was born and raised in Ohio.)

Here's an excerpt (pp. 98-99) from "Going Back in May":

A field sparrow singing. Dusty milkweed, and the heat-bleached, off-blue sky. A landscape I had known all my life. A herdsman’s landscape, utterly different from the strict, stripped horticultural beanfield-terra I had walked across a few minutes before. A “Constable landscape,” I suddenly called it. I was almost startled by the recognition. Bu both my easy, lifelong intimacy with such a scene—my earliest solid memory in a site-specific image of gazing, at age two, through a fence at nearby cattle grazing beside a country road—and by the remarkable antiquity of the scene, a fundamental composition going back how far? The Middle Ages?

I must have been about thirty years old at the time. I stood there a few minutes gazing, very interested, almost surprised, and almost honored by my circumstantial connection with that continuum and pastoral strain of dailiness and the daddy longlegs cleanness of the lines. The Constable association framed it, of course, gave it a genre, almost a dialect. By my antecedents are all of the British Isles, so the bond is far from whimsical.

I suppose it was the first time I realized the depth, the fastness, of the landscape imprint on my own person and saw at the same time the high bucolic stratum of the cordial archetype. It was Ohio, Ohioana, but it was also a brush with a vast phylogeny, and I now assume that it explains in part my casual fondness for the Barbizon painters when I happen across them as well as my long-standing fondness for the music of Henry Purcel.