Some writers, like some visual artists, have the gift of seeing more in the world than we can, so that through their eyes we see more finely, more richly, more deeply. In The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year, published in October, Margaret Renkl unfurls the natural world in words, drawing out its being in precise, evocative language. We see, and we are taught to see. She is, like Mary Oliver, from whom she takes an epigraph for the book, a master of attention.
The Comfort of Crows takes us through the year, week by week, in 52 short chapters, each introduced with a full-color illustration by Billy Renkl, Margaret’s brother, and an epigraph - Gerard Manley Hopkins, Richard Powers, Camille T. Dungy, Claire Keegan. There could be no more beautiful journey through the year. The chapter headings themselves are poetry: “An Acolyte of Benign Neglect,” “The Teeming Season,” “Of Berries and Death.” Many of these brief essays conclude with a “praise song,” such as “Praise Song for a Clothesline in Drought,” in which minute insects drink water from the fibers of a damp sheet: “Their fleet wings glint in the sun, bedazzling our bedclothes. Light upon light upon light.”
Some of Renkl’s sentences are so beautiful I read them two or three times. “When I was young, I craved the expansiveness of heat, the languor of an afternoon so hot the only choice was stillness.” Invoking her “half feral” childhood in Alabama, she and her brother left to their own devices “for hour after hour in the shade-deep woods,” she recalls toads “as soft as great-grandmothers you can hold in your hand.” Of humans she writes that “the world would count itself lucky if we were vultures or crows. An actual vulture turns death into feathers. An actual crow turns flesh into flight.”
The book is subtitled “A Backyard Year” but feels vastly more capacious than that suggests. Like Annie Dillard’s A Pilgrim at Tinker’s Creek, which also takes us through a year in the natural world, The Comfort of Crows sometimes feels cosmic in scope. Renkl writes of the damaged world that the “tragedy is not the failed world’s barren ugliness. The tragedy is its clinging beauty even as it fails. Until the very last cricket falls silent, the beauty-besotted will find a reason to love the world.”
Though “hubris has given us all a burning planet,” she exhorts us, with the hope that she has elsewhere described as nearly a spiritual practice: “Turn your face up to the sky. Listen. The world is trembling into possibility. The world is reminding us that this is what the world does best. New life. Rebirth. The greenness that rises out of ashes.”