Birds in the Hand : Fiction and Poetry about Birds

by Edited by Dylan Nelson and Kent Nelson

• ISBN13: 9780865476738
• ISBN10: 086547673X
• Format: Trade Book
• Copyright: 2004-04-21
• Publisher: North Point Press

Summary

Whether we watch birds at our feeders, travel vast distances to identify rare species, or simply pause in a busy day to listen to the call of a dove or the trill of a warbler, birds sustain us. Owls, hummingbirds, hawks, sparrows, wrens, herons, and many other birds populate this striking collection of fiction and poetry. In works from a celebrated group of contemporary authors, birds are sources of inspiration, confrontation, and revelation. The death of a kingfisher reinforces a boy's empathy for his beloved father; the song of a hermit thrush inspires a meditation on the transitory nature of existence; a bird hospital in India teaches that all life is precious. These stories and poems take us from New York and Hoboken to the Salton Sea and the wilds of Montana, from a hardware store to the westernmost Aleutian island, from a federal prison to forests, marshes, and seacoasts, and they bring to life the complex, often startling relationships between birds and human beings. By turns comical and poignant, disturbing and exhilarating, Birds in the Hand testifies to the ongoing mystery of birds, and to the mystery of the human heart. Book jacket.

Author Biography

Kent Nelson and Dylan Nelson are father and daughter. They both write fiction and have birded together for the past twenty-eight years. Kent's latest novel, Land That Moves, Land That Stands Still, will be published by Viking in 2003. He lives in Salida, Colorado. Dylan holds a BA in environmental biology from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the University of Oregon, where she was an editor for Northwest Review. She lives in the Catalina Mountains of southern Arizona.

Table of Contents

Preface

Li-Young Lee / Praise Them
Leslie Norris / The Kingfisher
Ethan Canin / Angel of Mercy, Angel of Wrath
Pattiann Rogers / The Hummingbird: A Seduction
Robert Hass / Duck Blind
Robert Hill Long / The White Ibis
R. T. Smith / Hardware Sparrows
David Wagoner / The Bird Watcher
Robert Olen Butler / Jealous Husband Returns in Form of Parrot
Joel Brouwer / Abracadabra Kit
David Bottoms / Under the Vulture-Tree
Albert Goldbarth / 27,000 Miles
William Meredith / The Jain Bird Hospital in Delhi
Sheri Joseph / The Elixir
Barbara Kingsolver / from Prodigal Summer
Charles Baxter / Cataract
Sherman Alexie / How to Obtain Eagle Feathers for Religious Use
Joy Harjo / Eagle Poem
Martha Silano / At the Shorebird Festival: Grays Harbor County, Washington
Elizabeth Bishop / North Haven
Hayden Carruth / The Birds of Vietnam
Howard Norman / from The Bird Artist
Andrea Barrett / Birds with No Feet
Greg Pape / Flamingos
Billy Collins / Driving Myself to a Poetry Reading
William Hathaway / The Bird Feeder
Philip Levine / The Sea We Read About
T. C. Boyle / Rara Avis
John L'Heureux / Flight
Kathleen Lynch / How to Build an Owl
W. D. Snodgrass / A Phoebe's Nest
Chase Twichell / Corporate Geese
Kim Addonizio / The Singing
Paul Zarzyski / Bizarzyski, Mad Bard, Carpenter Savant, and Chuckwagon Wrangler of Manchester, Montana, Feeds the Finicky Birds
Flannery O'Connor / The Turkey
Eudora Welty / A Still Moment
Richard Jackson / Worlds Apart
Jan Epton Seale / Big Bird Comes to the Rio Grande Valley in 1976
Louise Erdrich / Owls
Robert Penn Warren / Heart of Autumn
Peter Meinke / The Cranes
Maximilian Schlaks / A Long Sunday
William Archila / Bird
Daisy Fried / Guts
Jorie Graham / Detail from the Creation of Man
Rita Dove / Against Flight
Robert Dana / Watching the Nighthawk's Dive
Gladys Swan / Dreaming Crow
Kellie Wells / Transmigrations
Wendell Berry / The Heron
Brendan Galvin / One for the Life List
Richard Foerester / The Hohntor
Macklin Smith / Birding the Battle of Attu
Stanley Plumly / Cedar Waxwing on Scarlet Firehorn
Jim Harrison / from 0Farmer
Tim Gautreaux / Little Frogs in a Ditch
Sarah Getty / That Woman
B. J. Buckley / In June, In Summer
Maxine Kumin / Bringing Down the Birds
Andrew Hudgins / Raven Days
Richard Wilbur / The Writer
Barry Lopez / Emory Bear Hands' Birds
Maya Sonenberg / Beyond Mecca
Amy Clampitt / A Hermit Thrush
James Wright / The Quail
Seamus Heaney / Drifting Off
William Wenthe / Birds of Hoboken
Reginald Gibbons / No Matter What Has Happened This May
Mark Helprin / A Dove of the East
Derek Walcott / The Season of Phantasmal Peace

Contributors' Notes

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