Customer Reviews

Diary of a Left-Handed Bird Watcher

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Jim Schley, South Strafford VT: Leonard Nathan is the author of nine fabulous collections of poems, and the book here reviewed is a hybrid, written in prose, neither fiction nor nonfiction precisely. I use the term "precisely" on purpose, because Nathan's work is replete with exact connections and combinations, images and phrases that defy passing quickly over.

In design and presentation, Nathan's new book is beautiful and compact. In plot, his meta-fictional [ital] Diary is oblique, left-handed in more ways than one, built up like a montage of ruminative passages such as those in a personal diary. One ostensible purpose of Nathan's "entries" is to record the excursions of Thursday's Children, an otherwise unaffiliated gang of aspiring naturalists who gather once a week to carpool to promising sites with their field guides and binoculars. The narrator - a version of Nathan himself, bookworm and unabashed amateur - insists upon the distinction between the serendipitous [ital] birdwatcher and the more zealous [ital] birder, who is "more hunter than looker-on, more passionate about having seen than seeing," and whose Life List is paramount. Nathan playfully interlaces in these pages accounts of hilarious field-trips (grown men and women piling into cars to hurry somewhere because someone has reported sighting), snatches of dreams, poems from various writers, and meditations upon the allure of finally seeing - really [ital] seeing - an elusive exemplar, the snow bunting, which he believes he's only glimpsed once from the edge of an eye. Running through the other diary entries is a series of conversations between poet and scientist, in this case an ornithologist who scornfully questions the idea that an artist could make any genuinely useful contribution to comprehension of the avian world. Our poet is bewildered by the scientist's rebuttals, and he repeatedly tries to reformulate a precept that the scientist will accept. This philosophical confrontation is fierce and grand, even as the genuine friendship of these two men of contrary sensibilities is insightfully dramatized.

I cannot recommend [ital] Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher more delightedly. This is one of the most unusual and evocative books of prose I've read in a long while, as likely to please lovers of poetry as devotees of superb nature writing.

I'm impressed that my own group of friends in New England has become avid for birdwatching. Many of these are people who formerly lived seasonally in different houses, renting or house-sitting or even tenting, and who now have children and homes they've built. We've grown more alert to the other residents of our territory. The activities of the birds around us, arriving and nesting, mating and feeding and fledging then moving on in the fall, keep coming up in conversations as we pass on the sidewalk or in the aisles of a store - the first vireo heard, or last warbler; an unexpected glimpse of a scarlet tanager; the enormous gray goshawk on a maple bough.

In Genesis, Adam undertakes responsibility for assigning a name to each creature in existence, and ever since, poets have defended their task as comparably essential. In actual practice, even poets as skilled as Nathan are less likely to invent than refresh - using the shared vocabulary of our working-day language, to show all over again how bracingly words plunge us not [ital] out of but [ital] into what Denise Levertov calls the life around us. If the aim of scientific taxonomy is to be exhaustive, comprehensive, categorical, and discriminating, the aim of poetic rendering is to crisscross and blend. These are different but complementary modes of precision.

My grandfather has made a stunning book and it truely lets the reader see his deep passion for bird watching and his religious meaning to this hobbie. He captures real passion and makes this book a must have for birdwatchers everywhere.

This book is "about" birdwatching in the same sense that Moby Dick is "about" whaling. It's not a how-to book, and some of the history and folk tales that Nathan weaves into his narrative might not be strictly factual. But what does ring true are his anecdotes about the odd, obsessive nature of birdwatchers. What's the significance of keeping a life list? Why would someone stand for hours in a freezing field for a momentary glimpse of a couple of ounces of feather and bone? The writing is lyrical and poetic, and a certain kind of birdwatcher might find it boring. But more than any book I've read in the past 20 years, this one has stuck with me.

This book was so boring that I didn't finish it. I forced myself to read 70%, but couldn't continue. While Mr. Nathan has plenty of historical facts, poems and other tidbits, this book feels more like a literary exercise than a book that truly captures the spirit and delight of birding (or bird watching).