Emily M.'s response to Thomson

Jeffery Thomson’s book Birdwatching in Wartime is a unique collaboration of nature, language and culture. He utilizes the environment to create dense layers of language for his readers to work their way through. His presentation of foreign landscapes is both beautiful and dark, with rich language describing scenes that have both the good and bad aspects of reality. When describing his work Thomson cites the “softness” found in most nature-based poetry, as what he is working against, to create poems that are “real”. This idea of what is real is found throughout the book, beginning with the contemplation of his death in “Landscape with Swelling and Hives” to the presence of pain with actual consequences in “Ars Poetica with Pain.”
Thomson’s work is a collection of what he took away from his trip to South America. It is filled with knowledge, language, culture, beauty and pain. His experiences shape the book and create a very real setting for his reader that presents nature in a new light. Nature however is not always the focus, but sometimes just the muse as in “Twin” where the layering of ideas, stories and dense language mimic his description of the rainforest given during class. As he discussed the rainforest he said, “there is a lot of ‘stuff’ happening in the forest, animals behind animals, leaf behind leaf, and story behind story.” It is easy to see the over lapping of stories in “Twin”, and a second read through will give light to the play on words along with previous perceptions of the correlation between insanity and being poetic.
There was an attempt to catalog the landscapes, culture and language that Thomson encountered. “The bees that will strip every hair/from your head instead of swelling/ your hands with a thatch of venom,” says “Amazon Parable” presenting the facts in a very upfront way. This technique of bringing information into the light was also used in poems such as “Landscape with Footnotes” which supplies information he gathered and had referenced some in the book, as well as some historical matter that he merely found interesting. Writing this way was almost to take an impartial point of view, showing the good with the bad, creating poetry that had substance beyond the appreciation of natural beauty. This list like quality was used again in the poem “Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge: a Sequence”, where the listing seemed to be never ending and sometimes disconnected. Lines such as “But benevolence/must be the oceanic color of the tear/the streaks the emerald iridescence” and “This encyclopedia of articulate nothing, / taxonomy of damage, library of sand. / Manuscript of clouds, archipelago of crabs” point at language in a way that makes his readers question its meaning. These lines also display how nature and language are intertwined.
Thomson affectively created a book that changed the idea of poetry about nature. He gave the facts, created language that related back not only in description, but also in density and format, and worked to bring in all aspects of language (i.e. sound, look, complexity etc). He wrote about the reality of what he experienced in South America while also leaving his writing open to his readers to relate to on their own.