Birdology by Carolyne Van Der Meer | The Miramichi Reader

Birdology, Carolyne Van Der Meer’s most recent chapbook, offers an unflinching meditation on mortality and how our relationships with our parents evolve as we age, become more vulnerable, and eventually leave one another.

This beautifully sequenced collection of tender poems and slender essays moves through what the author calls a “spell of grief,” accompanied by flocks of gulls, house sparrows and rock pigeons.

The opening essay, “Birdology I”, the first in a series of five flash essays nested throughout the collection, sets the stage for using bird as metaphor. Walking by an injured pigeon the author ponders how we, as adults, may have to make choices that affect how our parents die.

I stopped and looked at him, and it felt a bit like a hand had reached into my chest and squeezed in a most uncomfortable way.

In this opening essay, and the poems and essays that follow, Van Der Meer uses unadorned language to gently pluck apart the layers of emotion that surround grief. Throughout the collection she offers up aspects of nature that parallel grief and loss in evocative, and often unexpected, ways. For example, in “Mother Nature”, snapping turtles become a metaphor for understanding a mother’s irritability in the face of physical decline and fragility.

... We think they are aggressive/ really they are just vulnerable

Van Der Meer is particularly skilful at juxtaposing these observations of the natural world with what is happening in the human world. For example, birds bathing in a puddle in carefree abandon sit side-by-side with the uneasy acceptance of moving a parent into a care home.

Sometimes we don’t know what awaits us. How suddenly on a
random day of puddle splashing, there is also a feeling of bereftness that cannot
be contained. A highway pile-up of grief.

In other poems, the author invites us to reimagine our understanding of (and ultimately, relationships with) the natural world.

Lately I’ve been listening to trees
I can’t help it because that’s where
the birds are and I’ve been listening to
them for longer	     It took a while to
actually hear the trees     or maybe 
that’s called paying attention

Throughout the collection, Van Der Meer acknowledges our need to brace for the inevitable good-bye in down-to-earth but tender ways—

my palm between her shoulder blades/ committing this tenderness to memory/ overwriting the sundered outline of the deer on the highway

Her commentaries on death (and its sometime terrible preliminaries) are always clear-eyed and sensitive. In “Birdology III” she writes—

It was like a stranger that came to town, death was. You didn’t expect it—or maybe you did—but when it arrived, you knew it was there.

The theme of regret also threads gently through the pages of this book. In one of the final poems, this litany is offered—

Daughters of mothers call weekly and then chide themselves for/ not calling more often/ yet are heartened by the birdsong in/ their mothers’ voices/ that sudden feeling of/ redemption

The tone throughout is refreshingly pragmatic but also forgiving and hopeful, as Van Der Meer, to quote Devon Gallant of Cactus Press, “wrests beauty and meaning from a world that is constantly around us …”,

Ultimately, Birdology is the author’s personal story of grief as she bears loving witness to her mother’s physical decline and loss of independence, as well as her father-in-law’s quiet death in hospital. But these poems and essays also transcend the personal and acknowledge the universality of grief by offering a birds’ eye view of “the anchor of loss” through powerful metaphors and observations of the natural world. Each page gently (and not so gently) reminds us “we do not know what awaits us” but it is possible to “… carry the bits of loved ones/ of humanity/ lost along the way.”

Carolyne Van Der Meer is a Montreal journalist, public relations professional and former university lecturer. Her articles, essays, short stories and poems have been published internationally. Her published books include: Motherlode: A Mosaic of Dutch Wartime Experience (WLUP, 2014); Journeywoman (Inanna, 2017); Heart of Goodness: The Life of Marguerite Bourgeoys in 30 Poems|Du cœur à l’âme: La vie de Marguerite Bourgeoys en 30 poèmes (Guernica Editions, 2020); Sensorial (Inanna, 2022) and All This As I Stand By (Ekstasis Editions, 2024). Chapbook publications include One Week’s Worth but a Lifetime More (Local Gems Press, 2022) and Broken Pieces: Hospital Experiences (2023).

Publisher: Cactus Press (Spring 2025)
ISBN: 978-1-990474-39-2

Catherine Walker

Catherine Walkeris a writer/editor living on the South Shore of Miꞌkmaꞌki (Nova Scotia). A founding member of the Little Books Collective, a community-building micropress in Lunenburg, Nova Scotia, Catherine is the author of two chapbooks: Short Takes: My seven-week career in the film biz (2024) and the call of many sorrows: fourteen poems (2023).