Jeffrey Thomson: Birdwatching in Wartime

This poetic text written by umfs own creative writing professor Jeffrey Thomson is similar in its description of nature to themes discussed in Gluck’s the Wild Iris, in density it is similar to Larry Levis’s Elegy apart from these two characteristics Thomson’s work stands apart from other texts that we have encountered thus far into our exploration of recent American poetry. The book is divided into five subsections and are each distinctly different from each other, part IV of the book is all short poems, parts I has longer poems filled with natural imagery that are a reaction of the authors time in Costa Rica. Found in these images are the “jesus Christ lizard,” the tsawaim, hoatzin, etc. Part II of the book is all actually one long poem with many different voices (a new voice or style every page.) Part III is longer poems (than the shorter pages of section II) the imagery is full of places in Costa Rica parts of Spanish history and more. Part V is the last subsection of the book and the poetry found in the last pages is some of the more complex and interesting poems of the book with themes like ars poetica (or the art of poetry) Stalin, and reoccurring nature themes.
In this collection of poems Thomson is trying to create and allow to exist a dualism in his poetry he is trying to use language in order to create a poem or work (stained glass window) while at the same time showing the reader a world that they do not know, he tries to use his poetry to show the outside world (birds of costa rica, or landscapes in a different country) I really enjoyed this dualism of the poetry being both that of a stained glass window and as a clear glass window to show a different part of the world. In many cases Thomsons poetry is dense and dark (Like ars poetica pg75) not only does the plot have three different levels of story going on (the story at hand, bugs and Yosemite sam, and Orpheus and Eurydice) it is also quite dark (Elmer fudd pisses himself as bugs bunny is about to shoot off his kneecaps with a shotgun) Overall the major theme of the book is Thomson creating works of poetry that use imagery that the reader is not familiar with in order to show a different side of the world and perhaps give readers a new take on the world. As such it is useful to attempt to digest this book nearby a computer as there are many objects, places, and themes in the book that will needed to be looked up in order to see the poems as they were intended to be understood. There is also a sense of intertextuality that resonates in the book (although Thomson said that this was not his intention when writing and editing these works.)
This text was very successful in accomplishing its goal of existing as a work of art in itself (stained glass idea) and as a means to tell an interesting story about other areas and aspects of the world (clear glass window idea) I found myself very rarely identifying species and plants described in the text (i.e. I had to learn about them before the poems made sense) leading me to do outside research about the areas that Thomson was describing; at the same time I found the density and eloquent (though dark) style of Thomson’s writing to be very artistic and even when I needed to look up definitions to understand the content of a sentence I could still very plainly see that the sentence in itself was something to look at and consider as art.