Publisher's Synopsis
Birdwatching in Wartime takes place around the globe, but finds its home in the rainforests of Costa Rica and Peru. The diverse and complexly layered environments of the neotropics are the perfect setting for these poems-both linguistically and atmospherically. Thomson explores the way questions of beauty, grief, and desire are filtered through particular landscapes and natural images, and along the way metaphor, memory, violence, and eros all combine to rewrite and alter the human experience of the natural world. As his poems break apart the traditional Linnean categories of natural history and drive the wedge of human memory and desire into the gaps, Thomson ultimately reveals and revels in the fact that the narratives we bring into the world color and shape that world to such an extent that we cannot easily judge what is the world and what the story.
