"[...] Let me ask

what you think of your own 

thicket. How it holds the meadow 

closed. Hides the precious 

and dappled. There's a natural order."

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   When I first set out to write this review of what is, at its core, a gorgeous and indefatigable collection of poetry, I found myself almost overwhelmed with my options for a position. There are coincidences in the context of A History of Half-Birds that struck so close to my own life last spring and summer— I was in the midst of separating from my husband, deeply homesick for my family in South Carolina, and spending a disproportionate amount of time in my dentist's office. I felt like all kinds of ridiculous creatures and abandoned outposts; I was floundering in my inbetweens. My age was the advised upper limit for wisdom tooth removal, but importantly, I hadn't passed the limit. I was getting a divorce while still on my mother's health insurance. I was suspended between seasons of my life in a way that was ironic, painful, and observable. And, for the first time in my own history, poetry felt far away. I could locate neither the ease nor urgency that had always been right there for me. I could not grasp how to negotiate poetry's place in the "house of [my] ruin." It was just gone from me. Taken for granted. 

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Enter Caroline Harper New and her triumph of A History of Half-Birds, which I received in a bubble mailer the color of pink lemonade. Reader— I was shocked at the ache these poems blasted to the surface; I felt as though all of the blood in my body was suddenly about to burst from my face. A quote from Emily Dickinson seared, too: "If I physically feel as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that it is poetry. [...] Is there any other way?" It was exuberance to feel this way among these pages, and at the end of that explosive feeling, I choked, My superstitions and sensitivities arrested my ability to get my mess out of these poems, my mess which I had necessarily put in. But I was there, I could feel these poems like the dampness after a scalding shower. I was overcome with renewal, though I couldn't find my new language yet.

"Dead things left by living things/ or living things left by dead."

The Archaeology Magazine

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   The embarrassing, needful impulse to use art as a way to explain the inconceivable lives uncontrollably within me, as I believe it does for many of us who choose to live in written worlds. While there are often noble intentions in this particular pursuit of meaning, the instinct may also rise reactively from fear, hatred, naivety, an inflation of ego(s), etc. I'm not sure that I can cleanly locate the origin of my own aim here. In the wake of utter and ongoing ecological devastation in the Carolinas, I've returned to this collection, spun out of flooded deltas and hurricane days. From where I stand, the port at work in "A History of Half-Birds" is an expert with staggering interdisciplinary valence; a cloaked shepherd heralding sunshine. 

  Though there is a clear regional attention that cuts brilliantly across the lakes, gardens, and hypothetical moons of this collection, any understanding in A History of Half-Birds is one of many, and should be considered as such. An act of translation from anthropology to poetry, bringing the worlds of "vascular velvet" and radium's half-life into language, where they twist and glimmer and lay down and dissipate— sinking into the soft sand, burrowing a microscopic cavity into a lyrical enamel. The poet scaffolds the natural world— "high-pile plush," "the thick oil of memory," "low-slung bodies"— these murmurs are chants and vice versa, reflective of the ongoing natural processes that exist within us and outside of us (but always within time). "The world is large and full of noises," says Jane Hirshfield. "A true poem reflects that." It is a history full of outsets and ascendancy, of being well-rooted— New's half-birds are not conscripted to a single background, nor one realm. The poet's ancestral mothers are those beautiful things present in any flesh and blood life, they are decimators tilling pearl millet: "nocturnal, arboreal, / insect-eating mammals." 

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 Sister taxa— your focus is sublime. New performs precision work on enormities and unseeables: an anthropologist of the most rapturous feeling.

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   Wide-ranging in form, with the appearance of sprawl— but A History of Half-Birds finds its anchor every time. So adequately botanical, New's diagnoses "intimately designed for the future" are explicit, though the ailments and experiences they pertain to flourish in an orchid-house heat of lusty vagueness. The poems soften the relationship between pain and tangibility, conceding at times to the friction of making art and making love:

                                                                 "We agreed. I'll write no more

​                                                                   poems about birds, or anything that has

                                                                   learned to bleed, or that which must do so

                                                                   to know the weight of its leaving."

                                                                                                   Fieldnotes on the Bloodmoon

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   The very blood of poetry, poetry meaning this and every here-and-now. In "Management of the Living," a poem located towards the beginning of the collection, the speaker asks, "Is this how I return to beauty?" 

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For myself, though work like New's, the answer is yes. 

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 A History of Half-Birds. By Caroline Harper New. Minneapolis: Milkweed Editions, 2024. 96pp. $16.00.

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Purchase: 

https://milkweed.org/book/a-history-of-half-birds

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