Wyrd] Bird (Paperback) (ISBN-13: 9781632430847)

In times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stancek's wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book-length lyric essay on the 12th-century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of climate catastrophe and political violence populated by literary, mythical, and historical figures from Milton's Eve to the biblical Satan to Keats's hand. The book deconstructs a Western tradition of good and evil by rereading, cross-questioning, and upsetting some of that tradition's central poetic texts. By refusing and confusing dualistic logic, wyrd] bird searches for an expression of visionary experience that remains rooted in the body, a mode of questioning that echoes out into further questioning, and a cry of elegiac loss that grips, stubbornly, onto love.

Author: Claire Marie Stancek
ISBN-10: 1632430843
ISBN-13: 9781632430847
Publisher: Omnidawn
Language: English
Published: 11/07/2020
Pages: 88
Format: Paperback
Weight: 0.35lbs
Size: 8.80h x 6.00w x 0.40d

Review Citation(s):
Library Journal 11/01/2020 pg. 89