A Review by Rita Powell
The wilderness is all around, our hope and our mirror. Carole Giangrande’s collection of poems in ‘this may be the year,’ embodies the collective wisdom and angst of our time. Birds’ presence is the key through-line for the collection which keeps us turning our attention to those small beings who can be thought of as peripheral but who, for Giangrande, are a kind of cipher with which to read life. We meditate with the sounds, textures, colors, and grammar of birds all around us. This puts into perspective both the quotidien walk of human life, as well as the tragedies and challenges of this year.
The Birdmind section is a superb integration of observation of the avian within the context of the urban wilderness and meditation on the human being. In ‘Hawk Pair,’ one of several poems about the hawks who live in Central Park, we move from direct observation
The hawk is brooding on her eggs.
…her mate lands, bearing a twig
small offering
to deep reflection
…the code
of mystery that draws him to brood here,
asks me to rest in the same hopemy body sheltering the day to come,
warming the smooth white curve of itwatching it hatch into daybreak,
infinite light.
These bird poems are chock full of juicy phrases that evoke both the bird and ideas beyond the birds. In ‘Hermit Thrush,’ the dead bird’s claws are “two commas in a broken/ sentence,” perfectly rendering the shape of the feet, and integrating those feet with language, sentences, and death as an interruption in the text, in this case, the line. In ‘Prothonotary Warbler,’ the bird is introduced as “Brilliant coin of sunlight,” evoking treasure and glitter and value as well as the actual color and affect of the bird.
Collected into four sections, Birdmind, Breath of Ghosts, Memory’s Shadow, and In the Long Grass, the geography of the book spans New York City and Toronto, the author’s two main places. There are a few poems that are from ‘elsewhere,’ memories of Israel, and engagements with national events of trauma, but even these feel held within the located-ness of the poet in the two main places. Where Giangrande writes from within observed somatic experience, her poems carry the reader with her. But not all the poems cohere. When she writes to reflect on contemporary events and issues, she is less original, and we lose the particularity of her witness. The collection is wonderfully focused and tight in the first section, and the second section, although a pivot to specific remembrances, carries the bird energy. But by sections three and four, we lose the gathered sense of purpose, and the collection becomes more diffuse.
The Birdmind inspiration does carry us all the way through the book, even to the final poem, where the collection turns back to its beginning. ‘In the Long Grass’ takes us to a raptor observatory tower, where there is “…nothing to do/ but sit in peace beside the shy heron.’ The poem lets that pure being open into wondering, “have we words to speak/ of anything?” and answering with a deep hope and wish, “What we want for ourselves,/ we wish for all: Peace in the long grass.” This book is a deeply hopeful meditation, calling us to attend to those non-human lives witnessing all around our human struggles, and believing: “Four million years before the sun goes out./ Today we rest in the long grass.”
this may be the year by Carole Giangrande was published by Inanna Publications in 2025.
Rita Powell holds an MFA in poetry from Seattle Pacific University and currently serves as the Episcopal Chaplain at Harvard. Her work in poetry and performance art explores deep knowledge of body and land in the tradition of Christian ritual and philosophy.