Sparrow Envy

March 1, 2021
Lanham, a birder, wildlife ecology professor, writer, and poet, improvises on the practice and language of bird watching in this provocative collection. As he considers nature's intricacy, beauty, and mystery and humankind's ironies, tragedies, and joys, his poems shimmer with precise observations conveyed in a walking-in-the-woods cadence energized by alliteration and near and internal rhymes. Here, too, are incisive prose pieces titled "Field Mark," as in a characteristic trait used to identify species. For Lanham, birding requires empathy: ""Be the bird."" And how he envies sparrows and all wild things for their freedom. As a Black man, Lanham the watcher is all-too often watched and imperiled, as he explains with sharp-beaked, drilling candor in "Nine Rules for the Black Birder." He offers a ""Lifeless List,"" a tally of racial violence and destruction, instead of a typical birder's life list. A self-appointed "taxonomic committee of one," he offers alternatives for bird names commemorating "white-supremacist men" and suggests new collective terms, including "A Mattering of Black birds." Lanham laments humankind's pillaging of the land, calling for us to be more attentive. "See the miracle" in every bird, in every living thing, and cherish it. "That intense care and love is called conservation." An astute, awakening, witty, and resonant work of dissent and a profound embrace of life.

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