An Aviary of Common Birds

An Aviary of Common Birds, English poet Lalah-Simone Springer’s debut collection, crackles with aural energy. In “Spring Evening Hymn,” we encounter a woman attending to domestic chores:

So-fires sparkle in her deep blue eyes
Sa-fires in the crease of her smile
So-fee-yahs in the crook of her arm
as Soph pulls her hair back
stirring curry in my kitchen
stirring curry in her socks.

Springer’s poems are paeans to the relishing of ordinary details. A date’s “lazuli coat is unseasonable / The lace of her shoes, too tight,” while a plastic fast-food bag is “lit from within, / leaking oil and spices like / blessings, a bossting.” It is a book humid with the erotic, too, as when “Sweetwater sizzles under / Thunderdrum’s clap // Drags her tongue / Across his double oxê.” The speaker navigates a volary of themes: relationships, queerness, and community.

Yet there is a stomach-tightening reckoning with cruelty, as in a poem where a man puts forward a crude and objectifying comparison of women, looking the speaker in the eye and saying:

Sometimes
You want                 sirloin steak

And sometimes
You want                 McDonalds

After a beat, the speaker offers a trenchant take on how it feels to be viewed as “prey,” reduced

To:         seared animal sandwich
Consumable     digestible         excretable
empty   calories         protein
Iron      flesh

Speaking the truth grounds the self, and a spell of words wills a sense of calm. The opening poem observes how “[m]ending hurts,” and counsels: “There’s nothing wrong with you. // Wait. // Wait. // Wait.” This self-acceptance is fully realized in the book’s final lines, where the speaker “[o]pen[s] the back door / to let yesterday out / and the window to let today in.”