Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
In my experience, independent publisher Arachne Press’s stalwart precision in choosing and sharing poetry and short fiction never disappoints. No exception to this observation, Phil Barnett’s Birds Knit My Ribs Together also feels longer than the short book implies upon initial engagement. Barnett’s relationships with birds was a fulcrum and salve as he negotiated a ten-year period of recovery from a significant illness that rendered him physically delimited. He became necessarily and unhurriedly “dependent” on the local fowl he observed through a nearby window where he sat daily. More than companions, the birds became the poet’s indexes and emotional thermometers.
The experiences of disablement that Barnett underwent were addressed directly by and in parallel with his perceptions and subsequent affective descriptions of the birds–though calling the poems merely descriptive does the poems and the reader a disservice. Barnett’s changes in health status, the loss of numerous personal relationships–including the cessation of his marriage–and myriad other shifts (many of them unwelcome) were met consistently by his attention to the birds and their contextual gardens, both literal and metaphoric.
Barnett notes that he “outsourced his consciousness onto the birds”; his poems reflect this noticing and assertion as a kind of emerging parable (dare I say hatching?). The diurnal ornithologies as recorded by Barnett having become poems in the first place is a kind of transmutation that, like most poetry, is undermined by explication.
“I can’t move, I watch birds” the poet tells us, in “Introduction,” which follows immediately after a reproduced image of a handwritten “tick sheet” listing and counting various bird species Barnett encountered over the years. Horses, verbs, clocks, ghosts, memories, terrors, and many more subjects manifest in these poems, the birds their carriers. More than serving only as flying or pausing talismans, the poems-as-birds convey a loss of and longing for connection, the grief accompanying remorse, as well as disappointment, rage, and aspiration, among other themes and images.
In “Jackdaws to Roost,” there is
always a fresh augury
there above the land turn’s knuckle
in cloud sunken bird shapes,
air cast, dark-parsed runes
and tomorrow?
ask the sky (15)
Here the reader is enfolded in forms at once mystical and empirical. These “shapes” are embodied while transgressing physicality. They are “runes,” and the sky above them can be questioned, for it is approachable, or at least open to and for querents. Birds’ and others’’ comings-and–goings, openings-and-closings occur in other places, too, including in “A Crack Must Have Opened,” in which we are told about how
the owl made a vortex
of itself
spiral tightened down by the pull
of the volewise grass (22)
This owl also “changes shape” and “maybe it passed on / a baton of morning / to the kestrel” (22). I found this poem invigorating and, in contrast, found it difficult while meaningful to read “Unsprung,” beginning with the lines “a dead heron has dropped out of a heron / in the hug of a stream’s curve” (24). This curve is not clearly the same as in the “Terrible Curve,” which features a dead swan who “sees through me” (26).
Death and loss seem evident for myriad and obvious reasons, throughout, yet, “You are not done / you still have many winds / to lean into to,” as “So Close” asserts. And in “When I was Water,” the poet was also lightning, as the poem’s conclusion notes, having articulated, “I seemed to know what water did.” (45)
In “Birds,” the mythographer poet tells us how “god drew the world in pencil,” the coloring-in (“outside the lines”) happened next, and then “all the birds were born / as sparks up and down earth’s nerves / electric signals to let land know / what sky is thinking” (48). It seems, perhaps, that this is the same introspective, curious sky that welcomes our questions, while each body, Disabled or not, is a planet with a unique nervous system.
Title: Birds Knit My Ribs Together
Author: Phil Barnett
Publisher: Arachne Press
Year: 2024
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About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, For The Birds Arts & Literary Magazine, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.