Hawk and Songbird: Poems

I had never heard of Susan Cowger until I was asked to review Hawk and Songbird, her recently published books of poems, and I am so glad I was asked.  These poems—there are more than seventy here–are not only well-made, but are brutally honest, rich in her presentation of the natural world, and marvelously imaginative as she draws metaphors from that world.

In a preface Cowger tells us that at the peak of the pandemic she was diagnosed with blood cancer (multiple myeloma).  These poems are her response to that deep concern, and in most of them she comes to a point of submission to God—but not without a struggle.   As she says in “Burning with Ash,”  

I go after God   striking my every word hard

Against every fatal edge    And so we prove

Each other    God’s steely smack of flint

Does not stop until a curl of my own heart ignites    drops

Onto the char-cloth   and I plead   please   dearest

tinder-nest of accrued prayer

catch a tiny spark

 In “I Talk into My Hands” she  writes:

I sing into the darkness with animal pain

A kind of wailing like coyote’s song

Where holding the high note means

Grateful something has died

Then she moves from that image to the image of Jesus crying out on the cross:  “a tipping back of your head and the howl. / I howl back.”

In the poem “Claws” she uses the image of claws to describe the terrible pain she is experiencing but then, a bit later she glances out the window and sees V s of geese

Leaning upward

lofting onto updraft

as if flight is nothing

nothing at all

but what will happen

Also in the preface Cowger writes that “these poems are not answers to questions.  The words herein ponder the way life & death fly above us, circle us, heckle & intimidate, exhaust faith.”

Almost all of Cowger’s imagery is drawn from the natural world even though she is confined to her bed much of the time.  In “Holiest” Cowger describes a red-tail hawk soaring “amid the annoying hit and run of a songbird,” asks why, and says she has no answers.  She can only “peck out a sound like joy” that asks “the strongest    holiest thing in the sky/to look at me    come after me/Help me.”  That thing is a red-tail hawk, which for Cowger, becomes a symbol of God.

In “Too Close to My Eyes” she describes a dragonfly stalling and staring into her and then imagines telling of it to her Beloved “as if/ the love of God whispered to me/could mean anything at all/to you.”  She is not so much disparaging her husband as she is telling the reader that in her sickness and pain she experiences bright, very personal, moments that are gifts from God.

“She Says You Get What You Get,” one of the few poems written from a third person perspective, gives a brutal self-portrait: “She props a gimpy leg,” accuses herself of “angling for God’s attention,” describes “another bruise blooming.”  Then she asks–as most of us might also–that “Despite the defect/ now it’s hard to hate/ what she loves?”

Let me conclude with these lines from the next to last poem in this collection, “What Happened.”  Early in the poem she describes “A larger circle/ of skull taken and not replaced right away”  and then, a few lines later, getting “face to face with this now terrible God”:

how I climbed onto the bench 

next to him    edging onto his lap   leaning

into the chest of Almighty   and the pulse

of that heartbeat   the twining 

meander of a single note 

     an unchangeable key

               a hail to me alone

                      a presence

that cannot be folded

or managed   more like a smell    a seasoning

seeping into and through

my being . . . .

I bow in awe before lines like these and, of course, before this God who is so present, so very present in the life of this poet, Susan Cowger.