712
PARTISAN REVIEW
ist's mind:
Today the stranger
is gone, & the querulous flute from his room
late at night. Rozier sulks. The man 's a mule.
I'll put this business on his back.
The uneven lines and abrupt line-breaks add emphasis to prose
meanings: "Within inches of the sill/ the nesting Wren takes ants and spi–
ders,! still struggling, from her mate's bill."
What sounds to modern ears like eccentricity in word-choice, a cer–
tain quirkiness of attitude that Alexander finds in Audubon - both quali–
ties are well adapted to this poet's elbowy slyness and delight in human
engagement with the natural world:
I have pressed my bootsoles
into mud & moss & dry leaf duff, improvising paths
in rangy curvilinear abundance
as I followed my whiJ1l
&joy, that flew ahead, half-seen .
Pamela Alexander seems a keen birder herself, and surely something
of her own voice speaks through the voice of our most famous ornithol–
ogist and lover of this continental wilderness which we have so roundly
abused:
I know them, their shapes & movements, their differing attitudes
of being still. I dream of balancing on the air
& when I wake it is to their noise , musings
that lift to raucousness. I have followed them
where no other man has gone, have shot
& ate them, or pierced & posed them on wires for Drawing,
have named them and made them famous.
In Alexander, John James Audubon has found, a century and a half
on, a worthy interpreter of his unsentimental, fiercely particularized en–
gagement with these curious creatures that delight the observer's eye as
they shelter among leaves and negotiate between earth and sky.
RICHARD TILLINGHAST
