Birds Art Life Death

A Field Guide to the Small and Significant

By: Kyo Maclear

Narrated by: Laurel Lefkow

Length: 4 hrs and 50 mins

Publisher's summary

A writer's search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this intimate and exuberant meditation on creativity and life - a field guide to things small and significant.

In 2012 Kyo Maclear met a musician with a passion for birds. Curious about what had prompted a young urban artist to suddenly embrace nature, she decided to follow him for a year to find out.

Observing two artists through seasonal shifts and migrations, Birds Art Life Death celebrates the particular madness of chasing after birds in a big city and explores what happens when the principles of birdwatching are applied to other aspects of art and life. It looks at the ecology of urban spaces and the creative and liberating effects of keeping your eyes and ears wide open.

Far from seeking the exotic, Kyo discovers joy in the birds she spots in city parks and harbours, along eaves and on wires. In a world that values big and fast, Kyo begins to look to the small, steady, slow accumulations of knowledge and the lulls that give way to contemplation.

Moving between the granular and the grand, peering into the inner landscape as much as the outer one, Birds Art Life Death asks how we are shaped and nurtured by our passions and how we might come to love and protect not only the world's natural places but also the challenging urban spaces where so many of us live.

Untitled (Swedish Fall) (1971/2003) Bas Jan Ader © Estate of Bas Jan Ader / SODRAC (2016). Bertolt Brecht, 'An die Nachgeborenen', in: Bertolt Brecht, Werke. Große kommentierte Berliner und Frankfurter Ausgabe, Band 12: Gedichte 2. © Bertolt Brecht / Suhrkamp Verlag 1988. The lines from 'What Kind of Times Are These', copyright © 2016 by the Adrienne Rich Literary Trust. Copyright © 1995 by Adrienne Rich, Collected Poems: 1950-2012 by Adrienne Rich. Used by permission of W.W. Norton & Company, Inc. The lines from Madness, Rack, and Honey, copyright © 2012 by Mary Ruefle. Used with permission of Wave Books.

©2017 Kyo Maclear (P)2017 HarperCollins Publishers

Critic reviews

"Every now and then you read a book that changes the way you see the world. For me, Birds Art Life Death is one such book. The writing is marvellously pure and honest and light. At the same time, magically, it is erudite, generous and brimming with meaning and event. It is a book I know I will return to again and again for inspiration and solace." (Barbara Gowdy)

"A meditation on freedom and confinement and the creative tension between the two.... The simple precision of Maclear's prose belies the depth, as if the book were the tip of the iceberg and what she has elided or omitted constitutes the rest. Writers and others will find inspiration in the advice to stop and hear the birds." (Kirkus Reviews)

"Intricate and delicate as birdsong, Kyo Maclear's clear-eyed observations of the natural world and our place in it challenge the velocity of modern life. A year spent birding is a year spent in passionate introspection. As she discovers beauty in urban cityscape, she leads us to turn fresh eyes to our surroundings. Her beloved birds become messengers of both loss and hope." (Julia Cameron, author of The Artist's Way)

Birds and lists

I love birding, I discovered this activity a year ago so I thought this book would be fun or interesting but neither, it is very boring; too many lists, as if to fill space and pseudo intellectual references.