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9781933974590

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"Thomas McGuire's Dark Devouring is a work of art unlike any collection I've ever read, quite singular in its focus-and yet, in the same breath, it's layered in history, it's a piercing exploration of species extinction and genocide, the wholesale slaughter of life, with the historical receipts that the magpie has gathered. The language itself is exquisite and restless, inquisitive and musical, woven into verses chiseled with gem-like precision. The final poem, ""Why Magpie Sings on Sun Mountain,"" is a gorgeous meditation in verse-one I'll return to often in years to come. Why? Because Dark Devouring charts the path of a human being through the interior and the exterior of a life. Because this is poetry rooted in wisdom. This is poetry that helps us all to find our way through a difficult world, that we might also sing on Sun Mountain, the ancient verses we have magpied from the fragments of our lives. -Brian Turner, author of The Wild Delight of Wild Things What's the collective term for a gathering of magpies? Among the ones I've encountered-a convocation, a mischief, a tittering-a tiding of magpies seems most fitting for the poems collected in Thomas McGuire's Dark Devouring-a tiding because, poem on poem, the testimony about magpies rises here like a sea to indict superstition, false understanding, and depredation; and a tiding because the book offers an alternative gospel, a rising of the natural within us, a ""magpiety"" we might embrace instead of the ""mean eye"" we humans have cast too often on the physical world. McGuire invites us to ""see / the tree, the bird in the bush / for what they are, not what / you dream they ought to be""-invites us, that is, to change our life. -Nathalie Anderson, author of Rough, co-author of Birds of North America"

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