Cormorant

Description:

Elizabeth Parker’s second collection explores its titular bird from all angles: from diving cormorants to cormorants in flight, cormorants in motion and also in stillness. The bird itself is always untameable and irreducible to human impressions, but is bound through poetry with a family history, legacy, and losses.

The cormorant is the present and the past, both part of and beyond these human stories. It can be an omen, the devil, the enemy of anglers, or perhaps just an elusive subject watched by humans.

Family is a key focus of this collection. Parker traces the journeys of her ancestors from Ireland to Liverpool docks and from The Midlands, the bloodlines meeting in London, the family then moving to The Forest of Dean and, finally, the poet starting her own family in Bristol. Parker plays close attention to the city and its inhabitants, human or more-than-human. There is a powerful depth to place here, which is full of carefully observed details about an independent natural world and how humans interact with it.

Sequences, repetition, and echoes are original techniques used to circle around the collection’s main themes. Poems of small joys are balanced by grief, for example in poems about a father suffering dementia, and by the theme of loss generally. The book is dedicated to the poet’s late sister, the playwright Helen K. Parker.

Through examinations of nature and the human, of shared losses and histories, Parker shows us how to regard the world compassionately. As she considers the miracle of the cormorant, she reminds us of the importance of wonder, offering an uplifting antidote to difficult times.