Dark Devouring: Songs from Magpie & Sun Mountain

Think of Dark Devouring as a riff on Czeslaw Milosz's impossible question: What is magpiety? Or as beautifully irreverent counterpastoral, uncanny eco-music that soothes, then rattles the limbic system. Equal parts love story/war story, it's a meditation on one man's growing admiration for magpies, targets of fierce, systematic extermination schemes. These poems spread a gospel of magpiety, dispatches of hope from the ecological wasteland, gazettes meant to restore faith in the healing power of old-time song-in the belief that blind/lost in a dark wood or on the rocky trail up Sun Mountain, singing makes the road easier. This polyphonic, hybrid collection encompasses one ecopoet's attempt to bird-dog his hunch it's more productive to think of man as a metaphor for magpie, not the other way around. Along the path to Sun Mountain, both the mystery and measure of magpiety screw in and out of focus, repeatedly, strangely, like some drunk old monk's vision, as he stands before a urinal, trying to read on the wall above him a daily gazette (gazza = Italian for magpie). Like Wallace Stevens's blackbird study, this collection revels in myriad ways of seeing magpie; its emotional and narrative arc loops like a zoomorphic Celtic knot through multiple sightings/citings/sitings of magpies voiced by diverse historical personages (an Anglo-Saxson scop, Arapaho storytellers, Gertrude Stein, Lewis and Clark). Think, finally, of Dark Devouring as an (un)natural history of magpies meant to devour darkness-cast light where ignorance, superstition, suspicion of what's Other threatens our survival as a species. Not for the fainthearted, this book sees whole convocations of magpies slaughtered; it mouths hard truths, rages at our current predicament. Yet magpie's a bird word that survives as avian populations plummet, as languages go the way of the dodo. The bird dressed in black and white endures.

Review :
Thomas McGuire's Dark Devouring is a work of art unlike any collection I've ever read, quite singular in its focus-and yet, in the same breath, it's layered in history, it's a piercing exploration of species extinction and genocide, the wholesale slaughter of life, with the historical receipts that the magpie has gathered. The language itself is exquisite and restless, inquisitive and musical, woven into verses chiseled with gem-like precision. The final poem, "Why Magpie Sings on Sun Mountain," is a gorgeous meditation in verse-one I'll return to often in years to come. Why? Because Dark Devouring charts the path of a human being through the interior and the exterior of a life. Because this is poetry rooted in wisdom. This is poetry that helps us all to find our way through a difficult world, that we might also sing on Sun Mountain, the ancient verses we have magpied from the fragments of our lives. -Brian Turner, author of The Wild Delight of Wild Things What's the collective term for a gathering of magpies? Among the ones I've encountered-a convocation, a mischief, a tittering-a tiding of magpies seems most fitting for the poems collected in Thomas McGuire's Dark Devouring-a tiding because, poem on poem, the testimony about magpies rises here like a sea to indict superstition, false understanding, and depredation; and a tiding because the book offers an alternative gospel, a rising of the natural within us, a "magpiety" we might embrace instead of the "mean eye" we humans have cast too often on the physical world. McGuire invites us to "see / the tree, the bird in the bush / for what they are, not what / you dream they ought to be"-invites us, that is, to change our life. -Nathalie Anderson, author of Rough, co-author of Birds of North America