A History of Half-Birds

There’s an untamed luminescence to Caroline Harper New’s debut, A History of Half-Birds, a collection steeped in science and mythology. Out of the floods and hurricanes of the Georgia delta, near Florida and the Gulf Coast, New forges a watery world made up of wild horses, the live mermaids of Weeki Wachi State Park, hurricane sisters “running around the Gulf naked,” and “half-birds,” who are “half-woman, half-bird : feathered like the loon with bones thick enough to plunge their low-slung bodies through the ice.”

An elephant named Bo “disappears into the Georgia pines” after escaping his rescuer, Carol, who “never wanted children,” but “only wanted / to set something free”:

Asian elephants have a lifespan of forty-eight years in the wild,
even less in captivity, of which Carol is acutely aware. What counts
as motherhood? For a horse, you must dig a pit
nine feet deep and borrow a tractor to drag it by the ankles; not unlike
pulling a stubborn calf from the womb. You can use the same chains.

The speaker recalls how, “[o]n hurricane days, Mama dressed us / in life jackets and bike helmets and tucked us / in the bathtub.” Later in the same poem, the speaker returns home as an adult “with a man // from New York who didn’t know how to swim,” and “Mama gave him a life jacket to keep in his Camry / just in case.”

Other highlights of this collection include discursive poems that New scores across the field of the page. “Notes on Devotion” opens with Skinner’s experiments with pigeons, who respond by “invent[ing[ their own religion”:

one bird swings its weight like a pendulum;
one turns counterclockwise three times;
one aims its beak to the corner and sings, My love

The poem winds toward its conclusion in a church, reflecting the speaker’s liminal role as observer of the intersections of human and nonhuman animals, seen through the lens of both anthropologist and maker:

                                                    but I still remember
my own young Sunday. The hollow sanctuary, where behind the preacher’s head
          a bird flew into the window over
                                             and over, and we
                                                               just kept singing.