WITHOUT A FIELD GUIDE

Robinson’s debut poetry collection seeks the wisdom of nature in things living and dead.

Nature may be red in tooth and claw, but that doesn’t make it any less appealing to the amateur naturalist. The observant speaker in these poems sees herself in the chaos and precarity of the natural world. As she laments in the title poem, “I am as human as the mother / who birthed me, who left me / a story where I featherstitch wings / to a page without a field guide to identify / who I am or where I’m flying.” Birds—particularly dead birds—litter the pages of this volume. A gull explodes like a pinata after being hit by a truck. A yellow rail has its legs cut off by a mower. “Of course, the death of the bird isn’t the point,” says the poet of the latter. “The point has to be the bird’s life: what it saw, / and who saw it while flying so blessedly damaged” (“Because of Beatitude”). Birds aren’t the book’s only casualties; a dead opossum wriggles with maggots, animate even in death. A washed-up jellyfish brings joy to the poet, who tries to examine it without deflating it. The dead do not give up their ability to converse; indeed, the continued existence of their bodies seems to reveal as many truths about the natural world as creatures still living. The poem “Wing in the Freezer” describes a curio given to the speaker by a hunter friend: the wing of a blue-winged teal. “I’m vegan, / but he knew I had a freezer of berries / and dead birds. The birds are for science. / The berries are for me. I don’t feed the dead, / but last night I spoke with them.” In poem after poem, the speaker asks the reader to help her find meaning in what remains.

The author writes with a sharp eye and a musical ear—she is just as much at home in the narrative as she is in the lyrical. She considers the “Body of the Great Blue Heron,” that most majestic of American wading birds: “Heron’s got a body / of hollow bones. What lives inside that space? / Is that where the soul lives, in whatever cavity / it can find? Is that our soul when we’re alone that thuds / in our chest against the breastbone?”The short lyric “Self-portrait in Fragments” reads like the object labels for a personal museum case: “bluff of bone, / nest of hair, / breath from the buzz of bees — / forest of scars, / drainpipe throat, / manic mess of puberty —” Though most of the poems orient themselves in the animal world, it isn’t difficult to discern the human stories lurking between the lines of grief and trauma, aging and regret. In “Where the Goldfinch,” a teenage girl latches on to a bird’s song in order to transport her out of a distressing situation, learning “to match the rhythm, / to no longer long, to leave the body / and fly to the branches, sing so quietly / the song fades instead of crashes.”

A transportive, serenely macabre collection of poems on the afterlife of things.