Miranda Pearson's The Aviary is a collection of sadnesses; not the fierce grief of injustice or bereavement but an endless grey coastal winter.
"...everyone pretends, more or less touches life with gloves on.";
All the love and/or lust affairs end badly, romance is a decoy, and longing cannot be repaired.
"Desire.
It's always the same.
Its folly.
Its stubborn inability to
live in contentment.";
Any hope out there, a reprieve from wariness and weariness? Not much, not even in the series of six poems entitled "Yoga Retreat"; written at St Peter's Abbey. Toward the conclusion of this volume, one poem hints at a tentative happiness: a walk with a friend, yellow tulips.
A dismayed middle-aged poet tries to make sense of it all. Irritable and nostalgic, the regrets would be disabling if it weren't for their poignancy, "nothing is how I planned it."; Readers who have traveled in the desert of middle age will recognize the territory. For those who have not, these poems about pervasive disappointment may entice a detour. As if.
"Somebody told me
It's possible to mend the past
through imagination,
to breathe into it
a different life.";
There is a chronic low-grade chill in the inner atmosphere but a truly depressed poet would not have sparks enough to write as well as Pearson does about depression; it's an exhilarating paradox. The writing is not disappointing, it's skilled. Then there is the promise of homeopathic poetics; a little more of what ails you will cure you. Perhaps a reader who can read Aviary deeply enough will be flipped out into sunlight. 0-88982-230-1
-- review by Hannah Main-Van Der Kamp

[BCBW 2007]