NONFICTION

Shaler's Fish

by Helen Macdonald
Atlantic Monthly. Feb. 2016. 96p. ISBN 9780802124630. $22; ebk. ISBN 9780802190703. POETRY
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Originally published in the UK in 1997, this collection from the author of the award-winning H Is for Hawk will surprise readers with its intensity and the diversity of its language and imagery. Dense and often difficult, these poems are rooted in the natural world even as they address love and the human condition. Macdonald's syntax is often broken with nonlinear turns, and she typically uses archaic language and spellings with little or no punctuation, relying on her mastery of line and stanza breaks to lead readers to a semblance of sense. What stands out is her use of assonance and internal rhymes, language that is richly lovely and lyrical: "Clinker, clink clink/ binoculars trained on Maeterlink, the/ headland, the bobolink and the lyre// of great light."
VERDICT "My pen crumples into a swan, it is singing/ inauthenticate myth, and not of future splendour… ," says one poem, and in the first poem, "Taxonomy," a wren sings fully with no "subsong," that is, an unstructured, often rambling, and low-volumed melody. Perhaps that's the key; these poems are fully drawn but murmuring with a subsong of their own. [See Prepub Alert, 8/3/15.]
Reviewed by Karla Huston, Appleton, WI , Feb 15, 2016
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