Bird Ornaments by Angel T. Dionne
Bird Ornaments
Angel T. Dionne
Broken Tribe Press, 2025
reviewed by Bethany Reid
Angel Dionne is a poet and an artist, and the poems in Bird Ornaments struck me as ekphrastic poems in search of surrealist art. Splintered bones, torn feathers, hats soaked in grief, a ragdoll left discarded in a box. Images—some more macabre than others—stack up, disparate, unconnected:
Records of a Life Well Lived
A fossilized stork
is a historical record of ancestry
scratching time
as if genetics were more
than heritable coincidence.
Pregnant barnacles
spill new life
into the Mariana trench’s depths,
scattering souls like dry parsley,
or so I’ve been told.
Slowly, a rigid persona emerges
using cilia to amble
from sea
to humble mud
where it sprouts toes
and feet
and ankles –
a sort of hereditary suffering.
What does it mean? I think this is the wrong question. Maybe, What does it evoke? The juxtaposed images suggest stories, but I wondered if the story I came up with would jive with what Dionne imagined (I doubt she would mind the difference). Look at this haiku-like stanza from “Keen Observations”:
A panting cat
drags an apple orchard
down the street.
As I read and puzzled over these poems, I found myself thinking of Emily Dickinson. The lack of editorial comment, the abruptness of lines were part of this, but also the lack of a “supposed person” (a Dickinson trademark). Even where the I of the poem is present, as in “Memories That Used to Keep Me Up at Night,” we have to connect the dots:
The way I used to see poetry
in the trees,
stanzas, like quivering pears,
drooping from the branches.
The final poem in the book, “Holding Onto Hope,” though it has a bird, is not close to what I picture when I read Dickinson’s “ ‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers –”
My soul is in the same damn place
as where it started—
incubating beneath a chicken
in a dirty barn.
Dionne’s bird (is it hope, or am I misreading the title?) isn’t perched “in the soul”; instead we get a bird with a soul wedged underneath, a soul like an egg. As John Yau writes, in Bird Ornaments “we see the world in different, dazzling parts, which don’t add up into something we can immediately grasp.” Did I love these kaleidoscopic poems? They’re not the sort I would copy into my commonplace book or memorize to recite to friends. But I loved the chutzpah of them, and I loved how they made my own mind spiral off into the unexpected.
Bethany Reid’s latest book of poetry, The Pear Tree: elegy for a farm was published on January 1st of this year. Her other books of poetry, include Sparrow, which won the 2012 Gell Poetry Prize, and Body My House (2018). Her poems, essays, and short stories have recently appeared in One Art, Passengers, Persimmon Tree, Constellations, and elsewhere, and her chapbook, The Thing with Feathers, was published in 2020 as part of Triple No. 10 by Ravenna Press. Bethany and her husband live in Edmonds, Washington, near their three grown daughters; she blogs about writing and life at http://www.bethanyareid.com .
Get Bird Ornaments at Bookshop.org
Read Angel T. Dionne’s poetry at Escape Into Life
Interview with Angel T. Dionne at Rob McClennan’s blog
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