Forging unlikely links, a review

The Sphere of Birds, Ciaran Berry’s debut collection of poems, effortlessly moves back and forth between here and there, then and now, the personal and the historic, the modern and the mythic.

Berry imagines the transatlantic journeys of John James Audubon and reveals his own heartfelt experience moving from his first house. The poems take as their subject such varied experiences as an eye exam in Manhattan and chasing rabbits around a beach in Donegal. These poems have a strong sense of place, whether it’s the imagined space of Coney Island in 1903 or the playground of Berry’s childhood convent school.

The Sphere of Birds delights in forging unlikely links, earthed in the stuff of paintings and in the lives of poets, artists, and the occasional saint. Drawing on the poet’s life in Ireland and the United States, the poems explore the joy and grief found in those places.

Moving from rural Ireland to the heart of New York City, from local detail to historical specifics, and from the experienced occasion to the imagined or interpreted event, Berry’s poems effectively master shifts in both time and space. Berry delves into the lives of artists, obscure historical figures, and other poets for inspiration. He embraces elements of both Irish and American poetry, paying tribute as much to the spirit of Larry Levis as to that of W. B. Yeats.

Accessible, immediate, and visceral, The Sphere of Birds offers a musicality that is increasingly rare in contemporary poetry.

A crow shot dead and hung from a steel pole
warns other crows away from a field of grain,
hard-won, where ochre ears change tack, go with
the wind. Its eye has been gouged out, sun beams
against the socket’s black, turns into steam
the film of rain stalled there while, loose and swift,
breeze ruffles up the feathers, dries the stain,
the blood that’s bloomed above the wound’s neat hole.

Things weather fast here, soon bird will be bone,
brittle and white, dead twig snapped underfoot
where the sky alters in seconds, shine to shower,
and harsher truths hit home hour after hour—
the sundew snagging flies, settling to eat,
a fat gull’s fractured keen that cuts through stone.

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“What an astonishing feel for language, physical fact and ramifying thought these poems show.  Nothing seems lost on Ciaran Berry’s quick eye, nor too rich or subtle for his quickening tongue.  He generates image after striking image in a language of peculiar immediacy—thoughtful, sensuous, and with a remarkable confidence of rhythmic control. Sliding between the everyday world of simple action and the deeper layers of imaginative attention, the richly packed poems of The Sphere of Birds signal a debut not just of young promise but of mature achievement.”—Eamon Grennan, author of The Quick of It 

“The Sphere of Birds is a book of excruciating beauty, expanding and contracting in an ever-widening circle from the personal to the historical, expositional to spiritual, blindness to vision.”

—Cathy Song, author of Cloud Moving Hands