The Beauty of Vultures, poems by Wendy McGrath, photos by Danny Miles

One day, Danny Miles, drummer for the Canadian alt rock band, July Talk, was taking a pre-show walk in a Florida neighbourhood when he spotted two sandhill cranes on a front lawn. At that moment, the idea of birding became something he couldn’t get out of his head. From this initial fascination, his passion for bird photography was born.

In 2017, Edmonton-based poet Wendy McGrath’s musician son, Eamon, a good friend and sometimes bandmate of Miles, told her about the drummer’s new-found passion for birding and bird photography. McGrath began following Mile’s work on social media. She was captivated and inspired by the images and reached out, inviting Miles to collaborate. The Beauty of Vultures was hatched.

This collection contains 31 poems arranged in three acts. Miles’s compelling photos—mostly black-and-whites with a few exceptions—appear on facing pages. Although most photos are of birds, a sprinkling of other woodland creatures make cameo appearances, including a raccoon, a rabbit, a coyote and a faun.

Miles’ photos are thoughtful and inventive. Some are intimate and feel like a quiet moment between photographer and subject. Others focus on capturing fleeting movements and flapping wings. Many are moody and contemplative. A few, especially of the little birds, heads thrown back, beaks wide, are laugh-out-loud funny. All are beautifully composed.

Rather than simply writing call-and-response ekphrastic poems to Miles’s images, McGrath let the photos serve as portals to a myriad of genres, including folklore, mythology, superstitions, dance, tarot, nursery rhymes and childhood memories. The photos also inspired her to experiment with different poetic forms, including the sonnet, pantoum, acrostic, ghazal, incantation, and even a mini play.

Rather than simply writing call-and-response ekphrastic poems to Miles’s images, McGrath let the photos serve as portals to a myriad of genres, including folklore, mythology, superstitions, dance, tarot, nursery rhymes and childhood memories.

NeWest Press describes McGrath’s inventive language as “winging its way between funny and serious, poignant and morbid, while always drawing parallels between the poet’s thoughts and the camera’s eye … [where] each unit of photography melds seamlessly with its poetic doppelgänger.” This interplay between photography, the natural world, and the poetic create a rich multi-sensory experience for readers.

Rather than “Notes” at the end of the book, McGrath and Miles chose to begin the collection with two short essays. This introduction focuses on the origin of this unique collaboration, McGrath’s reflections on the many ways she was inspired by the photos, and Miles’ thoughts on bird watching and bird photography and how it relates to his musical career.

The first section, “Paso doble” (a nod to the Latin dance form as well as this poet/photographer collaboration), opens with a showy photo of a peacock. The corresponding poem, “A message from the peahen to the peacock” puts that show-off in his place—

I’ve seen that gaudy display too often.
Hardly registers: stirs nothing in me.

The second poem wings to a very different place. “A barn swallow relative to objects and places” begins with this evocative list—

you are the weight of
one house key
two pencils
20 paper clips

The final verse makes a skillful turn toward the confessional—

I turn my house key in the lock, open my mouth to shout to an empty house
where I keep two pencils in a hand-blown glass cup made by my son
with 20 paper clips that have magnetized all on their own
I swallow this emptiness and simply shape my hands into a nest.

These first two opening poems set the stage for what is to come: beautifully crafted poems with unexpected perspectives, surprising images, and a total lack of sentimentality. Some of the titles, such as “Falling asleep reading Stephen King”, are small and perfect poems unto themselves.

In this first section McGrath taps into dreams, childhood memories and fairy tales. For example, in “Stills,” four small photos spark mythical retellings of folk tales and other stories, infused gently and skillfully with bird images. In “Hulda,” McGrath writes—

She was still. Waiting
to lift the second iron heating
on the stove she touched
the shirt sleeves and they lifted
like wings 


Hulda dreamed she was a white bird
with strength to fly home.

It’s hard not to be impressed by McGrath’s elegant and confident line breaks in this poem (and in many others). Her poems, all so very different from one another, are consistently uncluttered, often mysterious, and always relatable.

In her introductory essay, McGrath touches on how birds can be seen as links between the real and supernatural—messengers and harbingers. The second section, titled “The Hanged Man,” like the corresponding card in tarot, explores new perspectives.

The title poem for this section positions birds as divinations—

I surrendered to a small bird
to the witching of the nuthatch
towards some ominous purgatory
reading its claws and feathers like tarot

In response to one of Mile’s more contemplative photos, McGrath responds with unvarnished observations of the state of the world, returning to the meditative gull in the last stanza—

a gull perched on the head of a parched wooden eagle
meditates on macabre taxidermy 
…
dreaming of becoming an allegory in a painting of
Little birds with scarlet legs.

McGrath responds to two of Miles’ images with playful visuals of her own. In “Sparrow,” a photo of a tiny bird perched on a wooden picket is mirrored in lines of type turned sideways to create a fence. Later in the collection, a photo of a hungry red bird hanging upside down inspires a typographic representation of the iconic Redbird match box, complete with the warning “Keep away from children.”

A few of the photos conjured childhood memories, such as “Space to fill,” the vivid and almost too-real story of a loose tooth, a determined grandfather, and an even more determined granddaughter—

I twisted my own tooth watching Bugs Bunny bite a carrot
and ask me “What’s up, doc?”
Now I had a hole in my mouth. Space to fill with hollow words pulled
from grown-up mouths.

The third and final act of the collection, “Echoes,” holds the poems that are more explicitly about music and art. It also contains the singular poem, “A Chickadee,” a perfectly crafted six-line study in restraint, power and eloquence. Painters Rothko, Bakst, Egon, and Vermeer inspire four poems in this final section, all beautifully different from one another. “Rothko Comes Back in February” is especially evocative and explores several contexts, including what could be a Canadian winter—

February is the heart’s most brutal month
every four years it adds a day to itself
prolonging it’s feathered dark days

And of course, it’s no surprise that Miles’ photos might inspire poems with musical themes and motifs, including drummers who haunt Debussy (in “A faun in the afternoon”) or spot an owl and walk toward silence (in “At the Bathhouse: November 18, 2018”) where—

The owl and the drummer were old and newborn at the same moment.
Truth be told, it had been foretold in the beat of a drum and the words in a song

“Sing in many positions” is a clever found /redacted /manipulated text that offers sound advice on using the human voice. “Infinity and a guitar” is an intimate story of a young child’s relationship with his guitar (and the concept of always). In the spirit of paso doble, this collection is bookended by not one but two powerful poems. The title and penultimate poem, “The beauty of vultures”, explores the paradox of beauty and ugliness—

I am pulled toward the ugly — my first imaginings 
were faces of monsters and trolls and crones
in fairy tales my mother fed me from the one book we owned

The final poem, “Raven,” equally inspired by Miles’s photo and Gwendolyn MacEwan’s poem “The Shadow Maker,” is a powerful incantation, a parting gift from the poet—

make me the space where what you think you see is not
make me a nest of broken sticks and intellect
make me the simple universe inside an egg
Shadow-maker create me everywhere

There are a multitude of fascinating artistic, mythical and nature references embedded throughout the collection. Curious readers will find themselves embarking on more than a few searches to clarify, confirm, find out more. These are poems that invite you to return. Again and again. The Beauty of Vultures is part of NeWest Press’ Crow Said Poetry series, a collection of contemporary Canadian poetry exploring themes of identity, geography, and personal experience, with a focus on prairie perspectives and experimental forms.

Wendy McGrath is a Métis writer and artist living in amiskwacîwâska-hikan (Edmonton, Alberta) on Treaty 6 Territory. She won the inaugural Prairie Grindston Prize. Her writing embraces multiple genres—fiction, poetry, spoken work, and creative non-fiction. Her Santa Rosa trilogy—the novels Santa Rosa, North East and Broke City—continues her exploration of the working-class prairie gothic genre.

Danny Miles is a photographer, hip hop producer, and drummer for alt rock band July Talk. He is based in Toronto, Ontario. He posts bird photos on social media at #drummerswholovebirds.

Publisher: NeWest Press (April 1, 2025)
Paperback: 9″ x 6″ | 96 pages
ISBN: 9781774391129

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).