Tree Fall with Birdsong explores the natural world around the poet’s home in Mississippi and delves into memories of the rural landscapes of Iowa where he was raised, Flanders, and other places he has traveled. These poems look to the natural life cycle as a corollary of loss and renewal, both in response to illness and death of family and friends and to the collective sense of grief in the wake of the recent pandemic. Often overlooked details of daily life and nature lead to deep insight. Mortality, seen in “Tree Fall” with the loss of steadfast and familiar trees, is complemented by the creative force of “Birdsong.” The poems range in form and length from narrative free verse to a sequence of haiku, a pantoum, a ghazal, and a creation story. They include ekphrastic poems, retell myths of the underworld, and connect to the lore of wildflowers, snakes, birds, and trees.
Just as Kendall Dunkelberg’s poem, “Orpheus,” concludes its illumination of Eurydice being left behind in the underworld with “her face nearly restored to its former/ beauty, . . . to haunt [her husband’s] final days,” the rest of the collection, Tree Fall with Birdsong, also does much to restore poetry’s former beauty through hauntingly personal yet welcoming lyrics, painstakingly crafted in delightful, accessible language.
Claude Wilkinson, author of World Without End
The keenly attentive poems of Kendall Dunkelberg’s Tree Fall with Birdsong reveal his long immersion in the losses and continuities of the natural world and the ways in which the other-than-human can instruct us in the pleasure and pain of being human. The magical apple tree of his childhood, with its five-grafted types of fruit, eventually grows old, and at the home of his ninety-year-old mother, the enormous maple rots and will fall. A cluster of poems near the end of the book, written during the pandemic, speaks of the both/and of earthly experience. In “Gilgamesh,” “Grief is a cold dark country,/ whose citizens are clad in feathers…” But “Gilgamesh” is followed by “Inanna”-or “Ishtar, Persephone, Astarte,” who brings springtime, the “soft song of her familiar doves…her bees as they collect sweet nectar.” For, as Dunkelberg writes,
… a harvest is never an end, but a new
stage in the cycle, the way the wild goose
as she migrates, is always flying home,
and the road, though it never leaves,
always travels on, even as the river
flows ever constant to the sea. (“Tessellations”)
Ann Fisher-Wirth, coeditor of Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology and author of Paradise Is Jagged
Tree Fall with Birdsong is a sharp-eyed meditation on the natural world and the nature of being human. Kendall Dunkelberg’s beautifully crafted songs see beyond what we think we know, transforming vultures into brethren, the possessions of the dead into a smoldering treatise on grief, and cherry-picking into a familial ritual which speaks to the relentless, complicated, cyclic pleasures of life that will end, if we are lucky, in pie. These poems, full of dry humor and surprise, take on subjects as varied as love, death, cancer, lies, Gilgamesh, and even a woman tweeting in the forest-all anchored by the power and persistence of nature. With extraordinary insight, Dunkelberg considers again and again an essential question: “What is mortality in the face of this life”?
Jacqueline Allen Trimble, author of How to Survive the Apocalypse
Kendall Dunkelberg
directs the low-residency MFA in Creative Writing at Mississippi University for Women. He is editor of Poetry South and has three previous poetry collections, Barrier Island Suite, Time Capsules, and Landscapes and Architectures and the textbook, A Writer’s Craft: Multi-Genre Creative Writing. His poems appear in Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology and Southern Voices: Fifty Contemporary Poets.