A Murmuration of Starlings, Jake Adam York. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 2008. $14.95

 

By Heather Cousins

 

Jake Adam York’s A Murmuration of Starlings may bring to mind Natasha’s Trethewey’s Native Guard, last year’s Pulitzer Prize winning poetry collection.  Both deal with the politics of memory.  Both address race.  Both focus on the American South.  Both make one want to run to the library, dust off some autobiographies, some collected letters, some eyewitness accounts, and find out more.  And both play with formalist poetics in careful couplets, columns of iambic pentameter, and sonnets.  Trethewey even provides York with a lovely blurb on the back of his book: “...[His] words, like wings, rise from the ash of silence—a murmuration so that we don’t forget, so that no one disappears into history.”

 

But York’s collection is not derivative—at least not in the pejorative sense of the word; it deserves to be respected as its own project with its own pulsing energy.  York’s aim, as he describes in his appended “Notes,” is “to elegize and memorialize the martyrs of the Civil Rights movement.”  A Murmuration lyrically testifies to American racial violence, carrying the reader down dark, Southern boulevards and dusty, country paths, privy to the sufferings of the victims—Lamar Smith, Emmett Till, Jimmie Lee Jackson, and the four little girls killed in the bombing of Birmingham’s 16th Street Church.  Laudably, the collection avoids oversimplifying the individual struggles of the Civil Rights Era, refusing the easy binaries of innocence and guilt, goodness and badness, self and other.  In the sonnet-esque series “The Crowed He Becomes,” a lawyer—whose duty, of course, is to interpret, present, and argue evidence—answers our nation’s need for blame: “I’ll tell you who did it, he says.  We all did.” 

 

In ashes, clouds, feathers, smoke, headlights, and flashes of jazz and dynamite, A Murmuration of Starlings explodes with elegiac power.  Recurring bird imagery continually shifts in meaning, variously representing death, race, uncertainty, transformation, and witness.  What the gathering—the “murmuration” (yes, this is an actual, centuries-old term for the species’ group name)—“of starlings” ultimately embodies are the whispers of the past, little lights traveling over time and space to speak to us of American identities and American mistakes.

 

HEATHER COUSINS is a PhD student in Creative Writing at the University of Georgia. Her poetry has appeared in La Petite Zine, Staccato, and The Dunes Review.