Book Description

Praise for bird light"Elizabeth Cohen's book, Bird Light, is an exquisite collection of lyrical and imagistic poems firmly rooted in the natural world. She examines many bird species in these poems, but underneath those descriptions the poems are also rooted in the human, referring in an oblique way to loss and sorrow, joy and love. This is truly a beautiful book about survival and the way the natural world helps to heal us."--Maria Mazziotti Gillanwinner, American Book Award"These poems fluidly move between memory and a present experience of time, place, love, loss, and death while gently reminding readers that sophisticated treatment of these large ideas is a treasure to be sought, a pleasure that Cohen seeks and shares with us. Here are poems full of grace and quiet power." -Catherine Daly "In Egyptian creation mythology, the Bennu bird flew over the surface of primordial chaos and sang a song that punctured the void of silence to gave rise to the world; similarly, in Elizabeth Cohen's "Bird Light," an aviary of words delight and produce poems that take flight, sometimes, as in "The Yes," carrying with it the echo of Emily Dickinson ("had a glass of chilled maybe / with some toasted perhaps"), other times, as in "Clock," lifting sex and space and time in its sleek talons. Each landscape, whether personal or philosophical, metaphorical or syntactically playful, tracks a winged path through the page, lifting finally into that expanse where "the starlings murmurate // become a single moving hand / unwrapping the articulated pink bronchia of the trees." Fleeting and flitting, yet leaving indelibly lasting perceptions, Cohen's latest book is an ornithological poetic masterpiece." -Ravi Shankar"Layering disparate voices --from the colloquially humorous to the quietly elegiac -Elizabeth Cohen creates three-dimensional moments of reckoning. Reading Bird Light, we find ourselves within the constant swerves of avian flight and song, and, with almost unbearable accuracy, within the urgent emotions of our own lives." -Celia Bland