The Artwork in this project is by Kent Ambler. Copyright by the artist.
I read with great interest and delight Mary K O’ Melveny’s online poetry album, If You Want to Go to Heaven Follow a Songbird, featured on the Jerry Jazz Musician’s website. It was a pleasure to read a multi-dimensional, hybrid work that includes music, paintings, commentary by the poet, and O’Melveny’s diverse poems about the intersections of the human, musical, and natural worlds, particularly the universe of wild birds. She has a strong appreciation for our connections as sentient beings with other beings in nature, and she is observant and attentive to the comings and goings of the creatures in the wilderness and cultivated wildernesses that we all inhabit. As someone with an urban sensibility, I found myself experiencing the natural world in a new and revelatory way. I had never given much thought to the songs of birds, the possibilities of their musical “jazz” infused presence.
Her poems bring the reader into these worlds, prompting us to meditate and to celebrate these bonds. Additionally, her poetic explorations of works of various jazz musicians, which she connects most centrally with the songs and behavior of birds, cause us to view birds and music as both inspiration and as an embodiment of wonder and creativity.
In her poems through extended imagery, she develops awe for the inhabitants of the natural world, particularly bird life. Her poems about a pair of eagles nesting near her house teach us that they are harbingers of hope and of ongoing survival. For example, she writes: “To be blessed is to see two eagles nesting in a treetop.” In another poem, she connects the flight of a monarch butterfly with the gypsy music of Django Reinhardt. She also gives these creatures animate life— metaphorically as musicians.
In another poem, she connects the catbirds’ song, “a mewing,” with the jazz notes of Birdland, the Blue Note, Count Basie, among other jazz musicians. She writes, “They will /sing us a Broadway lullaby.” Finally, in “How to Write a Woodpecker Poem,” she compares the all too familiar sound of a woodpecker’s chiseling in the bark of a tree to drumming and transforms “an ordinary day. . .to jazz fusion.” These original imagistic and metaphoric leaps provide revelations about both the natural world and jazz itself.
O’Melveny also is an intense observer of natural phenomena—evident in her specific and concrete imagery. Witness her detailed descriptions, rich in color, rhythm, and movement, in “If You Want to Go to Heaven, Follow a Songbird”:
Anybody with feathers will do — it could be a claret-
splashed cardinal or his orange-dusted mate— see
them soar straight from a lush white hydrangea tree
to a leafy, peachy golden honeysuckle bush.
Listen to notes slide out from a freckle-chested
wood thrush from its hide-out in a petal-filled lilac
as it seizes some breeze, teases us with tales of freedom.
Pathways defined by siren songs beckon us far above
horizon lines, implore us to ignore fears, savor dreams.
While there are these moments of wonder, O’Melveny doesn’t ignore warnings about the climate crisis and the political turmoil in our world. In “Sounds of Music When Birds Have Left Us,” she reminds a reader that “three billion birds have disappeared,” including song sparrows, blackbirds, and doves, asking “Where will music go when skies have emptied/when memory no longer holds birdsong?” In “Birds of Paradise,” coupled with a Charlie Parker piece of the same name, she warns of among other things, “flood waters,” “vanishing coral reefs,” and global warming. In “Mourning Dove Portfolios,” she connects the insurrection on January 6 with the flight of doves and a sense of mourning.
One of the most engaging aspects of this volume is the inclusion of paintings by Kent Ambler and videos of performances by such jazz musicians as Miles Davis, Charlie Parker, Ramsey Lewis, and Nina Simone that complement the poems. In “Savoring Winter’s Silence,” for instance, a tableau of a winter morning is enhanced by a haunting winter landscape and Nina Simone’s piano rendition of “Sound of Silence.” And throughout the online volume, there are striking paintings of a variety of birds.
Experiencing this expansive, multisensory online volume gives us as readers fresh perspectives on our rightful place in the natural world. As Joe Maita, the publisher of Jerry Jazz Musician, comments: “Through the likes of these musicians and creatures of our natural world, her poems brim with motion and emotion, sound and silence, rhythm and stillness, beauty and comfort. Her consistently imaginative poetry compels readers to slow their pace and meditate on the wonders of the world with heart, passion, and measured disquiet.”
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Read more of Mary K O’Melveny’s writing in Lightwood. Go to nour Search Link and insert her name.
Mary K O’Melveny, a retired labor rights lawyer, lives with her wife in Woodstock, NY and Washington DC. Mary is the author of “A Woman of a Certain Age” and “MERGING STAR HYPOTHESIS” (Finishing Line Press 2018, 2020) and co-author of the Hudson Valley Women’s Writing Group anthology “An Apple In Her Hand.” A Pushcart Prize nominee, Mary has received award recognition for her poetry, including First Place in the 2017 Raynes Poetry Competition, the 2019 Slippery Elm Literary Journal Contest and the 2020 “Poems of Political Protest” Contest sponsored by City Limits Publishing. A new poetry collection “Dispatches From the Memory Care Museum” is published by Kelsay Press.
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Reviewer Jan Zlotnik Schmidt is a frequent contributor to Lightwood, both as writer and reviewer. A most recent book, with Tana Miller, is Joseph Cornell: The Man Who Loved Sparrows. To read more of her work, go to our Search Link and enter her name.
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