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The Bird Artists by Laurie Byro (LaurieByro.com)
Byro’s voice is so distinct that it seems possible to absolutely
identify an unlabeled poem as hers. Her poems offer Nature as both
refuge and threat. Love is both an incandescent and a consuming
fire. Byro’s Green Man wears a battered leather jacket — and leaves
you in shreds in the morning. This small but well-selected chapbook
highlights Byro’s gift for dichotomy — “I hadn’t yet decided which
life / was better.” “She cradles me. / She holds my soul over a flame.”
Byro’s speakers confess to the extent to which they overgive
themselves in relationships: “I gave birth / to his amber-eyed
bastard who without hesitation / he devoured.” But in the end, they
triumph: “I shall make myself / a meal of him,” Byro tells us.
--From the title poem:
When my skin no longer fits, I carry a bag of bones
to the edge of the ocean. I steal the breath from a gull.
In Byro’s skillful hands, pain, loss and longing are transformed into
movement, force and action. From them we learn what we are truly
capable of under duress.
— Grasslimb, www.grasslimb.com |
