The True Names of Birds

Kim Fahner is a poet and the author of You Must Imagine the Cold Here.

There is a sense of time evolving lyrically in Susan Goyette’s
evocative and sensuous poems, which carry us through the lives of
grandmothers, mothers, and daughters. At the start of the book, a
quotation from Tomas Transtromer reminds us: “Time is not a straight
line, it’s more of a labyrinth.” This thematic motif echoes
throughout The True Names of Birds.

In the title poem, Goyette speaks of the loss of childhood and wonder,
confiding that “wonder is what I regret losing most.” In “Regret
and All Her Nightgowns,” regret is personified as “a woman who
watches her reflection in soup spoons and still water.” Regret’s
“sadness is too close to beauty,” an observation that echoes an
earlier poem, “This Sadness,” in which Goyette conjures the ghost of
Yeats’s poetic paradoxes: “If I could change this sadness, / learn
the touch of a potter, / I’d coax it into a thing of beauty.”

Memory too finds a significant place in The True Names of Birds. As
Goyette so aptly puts it, “in every memory” there is “a haphazard
bulb or seed that blooms now in unexpected places.” Memories link past
to present through parental and spousal relationships, transforming the
realm of domesticity, which is usually perceived as ordinary, into
something poetic. Recalling Bronwen Wallace’s wisdom, the author of
this brilliant first collection reminds us that the extraordinary has
its true poetic roots in the ordinary rhythms of our daily lives.