The comfort of crows A backyard year

Margaret Renkl

Book - 2023

"In The Comfort of Crows, Margaret Renkl presents a literary devotional: fifty-two chapters that follow the creatures and plants in her backyard over the course of a year. As we move through the seasons -- from a crow spied on New Year's Day, its resourcefulness and sense of community setting a theme for the year, to the lingering bluebirds of December, revisiting the nest box they used in spring -- what develops is a portrait of joy and grief: joy in the ongoing pleasures of the natural world, and grief over winters that end too soon and songbirds that grow fewer and fewer. Along the way, we also glimpse the changing rhythms of a human life. Grown children, unexpectedly home during the pandemic, prepare to depart once more. Birds...ong and night-blooming flowers evoke generations past. The city and the country where Renkl raised her family transform a little more with each passing day. And the natural world, now in visible flux, requires every ounce of hope and commitment from the author--and from us. For, as Renkl writes, 'radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world.' With fifty-two original color artworks by the author's brother, Billy Renkl, The Comfort of Crows is a lovely and deeply moving book from a cherished observer of the natural world." --

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Subjects
Genres
Essays
Autobiographies
Published
New York : Spiegel & Grau [2023]
Language
English
Main Author
Margaret Renkl (author)
Other Authors
Billy Renkl (illustrator)
Edition
First edition
Item Description
"A luminous book that traces the passing of seasons, personal and natural." --Jacket.
Physical Description
xvi, 269 pages : color illustrations ; 22 cm
ISBN
9781954118461
  • Wherever You Are, Stop What You're Doing
  • Winter
  • The Season of Sleeping
  • Praise Song for the Coming Budburst
  • First Bird
  • How to Catch a Fox
  • The Bird Feeder
  • The Winter Garden
  • Praise Song for the Praise Song of a Song Sparrow in Winter
  • Hate to See That Evening Sun Go Down
  • A Seed in Darkest Winter
  • Praise Song for the Dog's Marvelous Nose
  • Done with Waiting
  • It's a Mystery
  • Praise Song for Mole Hands in Coyote Scat
  • The Crow Family
  • The Knothole
  • Wild Joy
  • Ephemeral
  • Praise Song for a Spring I Was Not Alive to See
  • Spring
  • The Season of Waking
  • Who Will Mourn Them When They Are Gone?
  • Praise Song for the Maple Tree's First Green
  • The Names of Flowers
  • The Beautiful World beside the Broken One
  • Wildflowers at My Feet and Songbirds in My Trees
  • Praise Song for the Killdeer on the School Softball Field
  • Metamorphosis
  • Praise Song for the Alien in the Shade Garden
  • Hide and Seek
  • My Life in Mice
  • Praise Song for the Redbird Who Has Lost His Crest and the Skink Who Has Lost His Tail
  • The Bobcat Next Door
  • And Then There Were None
  • Dust to Dust
  • Praise Song for Solomon's Seal
  • An Acolyte of Benign Neglect
  • Praise Song for All the Beginnings
  • The Grief of Lost Time
  • Praise Song for the Baby Chickadees
  • Summer
  • The Season of Singing
  • Praise Song for the Skink Who Has Gone to Ground
  • Thirty-Four Is Tadpoles
  • Praise Song for the Red Fox, Screaming in the Driveway
  • Loving the Unloved Animals
  • Pickers
  • Of Berries and Death
  • The Teeming Season
  • Praise Song for the Carpenter Bees Eating Our Fence to Ruin
  • Kept Safe in the Womb of the World
  • Reverse Nesting
  • The Spider in My Life
  • Praise Song for What Hides in Plain Sight
  • My Life in Rabbits
  • Praise Song for the First Red Leaf of the Black Gum Tree
  • Dislocation
  • Praise Song for the Ragged Season
  • The World Is a Collage
  • Praise Song for the Holes in Pawpaw Leaves
  • Imagination
  • Praise Song for Fingers That Do Not Form a Fist
  • Fall
  • The Season of Making Ready
  • Praise Song for a Clothesline in Drought
  • Autumn Light
  • Flower of Dreams
  • Praise Song for the Back Side of the Sign
  • The Last Hummingbird
  • The Butterfly Cage
  • Praise Song for Sleeping Bees
  • Holiness
  • Praise Song for Forgetfulness
  • Because I Can't Stop Drinking in the Light
  • The Lazarus Snail
  • Praise Song for a Larger Home
  • How to Rake Leaves on a Windy Day
  • The Mast Year
  • And Now the Light Is Failing
  • Praise Song for Dead Leaves
  • Ode to a Dark Season
  • The Thing with Feathers
  • Author's Note
  • Author's Acknowledgments
  • Artist's Acknowledgments
  • About the Author
  • About the Artist
Review by Booklist Review

Renkl's book of 52 short essays written in the style of religious breviaries is designed to cover a year. She focuses largely on the flora and fauna around her Tennessee home, where she encounters an owl pellet, only to discover it is merely discarded vacuum fluff. At times, she casts back to the natural world of her Alabama childhood, when she picked berries amidst the rattlesnakes. While full of memories, her essays also fixate on the present--the COVID era, and the political landscape in particular. Renkl recalls feeling overwhelmed by child-rearing while she also mourns her currently empty nest, making for her assertion that one can "want two contrary things at once." Sprinkled liberally throughout are "praise songs"--little sub-essays--one of which describes spying exquisite mole hands in a mound of coyote scat. These little extras, just like the epigrams at the beginning of each essay, pack an extra punch into this tidy volume billed as a "literary devotional." Indeed, readers can return to these pages often, through the seasons of their own lives.

From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review

New York Times columnist Renkl (Late Migrations) invites readers along on a year of loving outdoor observations in this gently moving memoir. In 52 essays--one per week--Renkl reflects on what she saw and experienced in her Nashville garden over the course of 2022, ruminations that sometimes give way to sense memories of urban parks, a borrowed cabin, and her childhood home in Alabama. Balancing lyrical descriptions of unusual insects and bird-feeder maintenance ("The only thing to do when a Cooper's hawk stakes out a feeder is to take the feeder down.... The hawk and the owl must eat, too, I know, but I don't wish to make their bloody work any easier") with rigorous environmentalist queries, she nudges readers to interrogate their place in the natural world. Quandaries abound: Are people more important than the wild foxes made ill from poisons set out to kill their prey? Should people interfere to rescue a baby bird or let its natural predators claim it? Rather than answer those questions, Renkl lets them hang, leaving readers to think them through for themselves. This gorgeous reflection on humanity's symbiotic relationship with the outdoors will transform the way readers interact with their own backyards. Agent: Kristyn Keene Benton, ICM/CAA. (Oct.)Correction: An earlier version of this review incorrectly suggested that the author owned a cabin.

(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Kirkus Book Review

Serene reflections on the changes of the seasons. In her third book of essays, following Late Migrations and Graceland, At Last, Renkl turns her attention to her own backyard. In 52 chapters, she contemplates the changes that take place in the wild over the course of the four seasons. Although she views her life as a "linear narrative," she experiences the natural world as a "repeating pattern." Rather than writing about a single year, Renkl gathers bits from across several years, and offers insightful observations related to those repetitions. By immersing herself in the natural world, the author maintains that she is able to cope with the toxic politics of today's world--not to hide, but to achieve balance. Particularly during the early days of the pandemic, she found that while TV news was "full of terror," the trees were "full of music" from blue jays, chickadees, and redbirds. One polarizing topic that Renkl cannot avoid by a trip outdoors is climate change. Throughout, she discusses the shifts she witnessed in nature as a result, including the reduction in the bee population. This is one reason she does not use poisonous chemicals on her lawn and prefers planting wildflowers to maintaining a manicured landscape. "I can't change Americans' love affair with poison, and I can't solve the problems of climate change," she writes, "but I can plant a garden." Among the touching and relatable moments that nature lovers will appreciate are Renkl's memories of catching tadpoles in spring with her brother as a child in Alabama, the sound of summer thunderstorms and cicadas, and the unparalleled beauty of autumn light, "the loveliest light there is." Despite the death that comes with winter, which she once considered her least favorite season, she finds comfort that there "will always be a resurrection." A welcome escape from the hectic world. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.

Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.