The Hummingbird Murders

Bert Almon is a professor of English at the University of Alberta and
author of Calling Texas.

McMaster’s long poem centres on a family’s summer spent in the
wilderness of Northern Quebec. The narrator begins to observe and feed
three hummingbirds and after a while finds the first one dead, then
another. She suspects that one black spotted bird has killed them.
Finally the black spotted hummingbird is killed when it flies against a
window glass. From this rather slender narrative McMaster has built her
poem, apparently using the events as an objective correlative for some
marital unhappiness. But the parallels are never made clear, and the
family events are only adumbrated. The slightness of plot and incident
can’t support the feelings that the poem means to evoke. The style is
flat, hamstrung by short lines and bland diction. Here and there a touch
of parallelism or rhyme gives some intensity but the poem remains
inaccessible to the reader, locked in its private references. It ends
with the family’s departure from the north, and the narrator takes the
evasive course of saying “Maybe there are no answers.” While that
may be true, a work of art must say more than this.