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Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay by Travis Mason (review)

Travis Mason. Ornithologies of Desire: Ecocritical Essays, Avian Poetics, and Don McKay. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier up. Environmental Humanities Series. 285 pp. Like many of the birds that it discusses, whether sparrows that flit from branch to branch in the backyard, swallows that swoop and dive across cliff faces, or sandpipers that migrate vast distances across the globe, Travis Mason's Ornithologies of Desire is a text defined by movement. Mason suggests that the aspiring ecocritic should always be a bit restless, content not just to stay in the library but, rather, following the urge to get outside, walking the shorelines, streets, and parks of our everyday habitats to get to know the creatures with whom we share them a little better. Yet this study of life beyond the library is itself supplemented by texts--the notebook, the field guide, the scientific article, and, most significantly, a whole series of poems, most of which are about birds. For Mason the goal is to shuttle back and forth between text and world, exploring the places where humans and nonhuman nature, poetry and science, different cultural ways of knowing, and critical and creative pursuits overlap. Mason hopes that if his textual alter ego, the Birder Critic, can "manage to negotiate the terrain of an ecopoem--by consulting field guide entries and making trips to science libraries--then listening to the world outside will become easier and more meaningful" (108). The tension between metaphorical knowing and scientific knowledge that exists in Don McKay's poems, the book further contends, "instigates in the careful reader a desire to step out" (168), testing and modifying his or her accumulated knowledge in the wider world while leaving room for surprise. This acknowledges the force of what McKay defines as wilderness: "the capacity of all things to elude the mind's appropriations" (Vis a Vis 21). The short chapters and interchapters of the book, each of which is titled after some aspect of birds or birding, embody this spirit of curiosity as the Birder Critic invites readers to join him on rambles in and around Vancouver, a place that he is starting to learn after relocating from Southern Ontario. Much of this book argues for the value of scientific literacy in developing a more well-rounded ecocriticism. Echoing Laurie Ricou's advocacy of habitat studies, as well as the work of several first-wave North American ecocritics (for example, Glen Love, John Elder, Karl Kroeber), Mason proposes that by engaging with scientific views of the nonhuman world and getting out into the field, the reader will develop a better appreciation of ecological contexts and relationships within and beyond literary texts. In many ways, this is a laudable goal, and one that is probably as good for the body as it is for the mind. At the same time, applying a habitat studies approach to McKay's work on birds presents some structural challenges because the birds in his poems occupy many different places, only some of which are native to the West Coast sites of the Birder Critic's rambles. There is a tension in the book, then, between a desire to embed oneself deeply in a local place (which strikes me as one kind of project) and the need for a book on McKay's bird poetry to range far and wide, both geographically and in terms of a larger CanLit tradition (which seems quite another kind of project). At times these two projects coincide quite nicely with one another in Mason's text, but at others they prove to be a slightly awkward fit. The political animal in me also wonders if McKay's (and, by extension, Mason's) ideas about the combined value of scientific and poetic attention are enough to meet the environmental challenges of the present and future, wherein threats are often stretched out in time and space and where material agencies violate species boundaries. …