In one of the oldest poems in English literature, there is a beautiful moment when a lone sailor, battling against stormy winter seas and his troubled soul, describes how birds have replaced human company for him on the ‘ice-cold way’ – an admission that carries both comfort and sardonic misery. His entertainment is the ‘swan’s song’, men’s laughter is now ‘the gannet’s sound and curlew’s cry’, and the warming tonic of mead is echoed in the ‘gull’s singing’. Where ‘storms beat stone cliffs’, a white-tailed sea eagle yells with the roar of crashing waves. The Seafarer not only provides us with one of our first ornithological references in the English language, but also, most powerfully, the earliest written description of birds evoking place, being associated with a distinct landscape. This poem is not alone, however, in suggesting to us how birds could inspire a feeling for place more than 1,000 years ago. There are other glimpses, beyond the realms of poetry. We need only look around us, at real places. Hidden in the names of towns and villages are the ghostly traces of birds conjuring powerful identities for people in the landscapes and settlements of early medieval England.
Grief insinuated itself across generations of my family. It had lived in my dad’s childhood home long before it lived in mine. My dad’s father, my grandfather, had his own sad backstory. He had been in and out of jail for bootlegging, and his money problems led him to burn down his car-repair garage for the insurance money. A sympathetic local sheriff tipped him off that the authorities were onto him, so my grandfather gathered his family and prepared to flee their home in Redwood Falls, Minn. My dad, then 10 years old, had minutes to decide what was important enough to save. He rushed to the pigeons he had hand-raised from eggs to fluffy chicks to imprinted pets, shooing them into the darkness from the coop he’d built, knowing they’d likely die.
That story always haunted me. “That’s so sad!” I’d wail. But my dad laughed when he told it, a wry expression on his face. If there was a fine line between tragedy and absurdity, my dad drew it where he pleased. When life dealt blows — like when his aging mom got cancer or his aging dad drove his car through an office building — he made remarks that would have seemed brittle from anyone who lacked his softness. “Oh well,” he’d say, making eye contact that I’d feel in my chest. “We’ll all be dead in 100 years, anyway.” These conversations happened in private, maybe in his two-seater sports car on the way to a museum or when he walked alongside me, teaching me to ride a bike. In these moments it was like we were in cahoots and Grief was the odd one out.
Do I want to live to be 100? Do you?
I thought I did. I mean, why not? I envisioned a relaxing old age of books, movies, great-grandchildren, gossiping with the other elderly folks. The longer we can put off death, the better, I figured.
But these days, I wonder.
Despite the foreboding topic of environmental disaster, the novel rewards readers with peace and solace after persevering through a series of tragedies that feel too close to home. “The Light Pirate” is a symphony of beauty and heartbreak, survival and loneliness. Combined, it’s a haunting melody of nature.
Alternately smitten and sober-minded, this beautiful book, filled with bright wood carvings, is not a dry, cerebral genealogy but a living lineage. Without romanticizing the fraught and fragile fellowship, it celebrates the making of poetry in community — stirring all comers into co-creation.
The paper’s cheeky, truth-dealing obits have inspired a cult readership. The books that collect them, with titles devoted to “Rogues,” “Heroes and Adventurers,” “Naval Obituaries,” “Sports” and so on, are oddly uplifting, better than edibles, to tuck into before bed.
The latest Telegraph collection is titled “Eccentric Lives.” It’s a book about oddballs and joy-hogs and the especially drunken and/or irascible, and it may be the best yet. The English journalist Jessica Mitford, in her letters, said that the slogan for her funeral would be “brevity followed by levity.” The Telegraph seems to abide by similar rules.