The Wisdom of Birds in Robert Bringhurst’s Poetry

Abstract

Canadian poet Robert Bringhurst has spent a lifetime listening for whatever lessons the natural world and nonhuman animals have to teach him. Throughout a literary career spanning well over 40 years, he has composed poems for solo and multiple voices that seek to mimic the polyphonic texture of the world. In fact, he conceives of his poems as being primarily born in the voice and as recordings of his encounters with the nonhuman that he then transposes to the blank page. If, as Lawrence Buell contends, “environmentally oriented” writing is that which is primarily concerned with the representation of the nonhuman environment and the relations between human and nonhuman beings (1995, 7-8), then Bringhurst’s poetry is primarily environmentally-sensitive poetry. This chapter focuses on two poems from his Selected Poems (2009), “Finch” and “Birds on the Water”, which, despite their deceptive simplicity and linguistic transparency, problematise the way humans perceive the animal as “other”. Bringhurst unveils lessons of wisdom that he unearths in his encounter with these creatures dwelling à la Heidegger on this all-too-mortal Earth. A close reading of both poems discloses an ecocentric ethics at work in Bringhurst’s poetics, which celebrates the richness inherent in biodiversity, affirms the intrinsic value of all natural life, and counteracts the nonsense of speciesism’s assumption that it is only in relation to human beings that anything else (both animate and inanimate) has value.