Reviewed by Jenna Kwon
Summary:
“How Birds Fly” (St. Andrews University Press, 2018) is a poetry collection by an X-ray Technologist Steve Cushman, exploring themes such as family, fulfillment and mortality. Told at times through the lens of a child, spouse, parent, and clinician, the collection offers insight into the everyday moments that shape our lives. As his first full-length poetry collection, it won the 2018 Lena Shull Book Award.
Despite being a pre-medical student not yet introduced to the hospital wards, I was often brought straight into Cushman’s everyday hospital scenes. I could vividly picture the subtle smiles on the physicians’ faces in each poem: wondering what would be served on the brown food trays that day, learning that a biopsy came back benign, or realizing that an injured infant had not been harmed by his own mother. Yet, the sequence of the poems constantly reminds the reader about the inevitable truths of life; just as one becomes immersed in the joy of the little moments in poems like “Morning Light” and “Silent Time,” we are confronted with the more somber side of life in poems like “Dream Job”.
While Cushman’s poetry draws on a range of different experiences, from watching a downy woodpecker sit in his backyard to seeing his first patient death, the overarching theme is clear. Everyone is given a number of roles over the course of his or her life—in Cushman’s case as child, sibling, spouse, and clinician. The book communicates that no single role is easy, and growing older does not necessarily make life any easier. After reading the book, I felt not only the burden of having to adapt to different social and professional roles, but also the rewards of happiness each role brings separately.
Because Cushman’s poems are so connected to the life cycle, readers at any point in that cycle will relate. Through his poetry, we learn that it was difficult to understand his parents as a son, and that it is equally challenging to fill the role of parent for his son, who in the poem “At the Playground” is described as “someone I’m still uncomfortable with.”
Cushman’s poetry, while involved with the life cycle, is often constructed around his clinical experiences. In the poem “Work,” Cushman describes how he answers when his son asks about his day: he does not talk about x-raying a man whose arm was caught in a factory machine—“he’ll learn all that soon enough.” He also decides not to expose the reality that the real world “will probably be nothing at all like he imagines,” as his son is “young enough to believe in video games,/ to believe he is capable of anything,/ even saving a princess with his bare hands.” Finally, he describes that after taking an x-ray of a dying boy, he calls his son. Here he describes how he “wanted to tell him to forget about homework, / and that damn TV, / to go outside and smell the air, / roll around in the grass,” but didn’t. Because he describes so many types of human interactions, the book is easy to relate to as a college student.
Not to mention, the simplicity of the language made me linger with each poem. It not only enabled me to envision myself in the clinical scenes in a few short years, but also belied the depth of emotion and thought conveyed in each piece. As I think through the poems in this collection, they demonstrate that after all, we know there isn’t always an evident answer or scientific explanation for many of life’s complications: “it is like magic, all of it.”
The Poet Writes Back
First off, thanks to Jenna Kwon for her heartfelt and thorough reading of How Birds Fly. As someone who has been writing for almost thirty years now, I don’t think writers choose the things they write about, but certain themes and subjects and interests bubble to the surface. For example, my first novel was a mystery and second was a young adult novel. While writing fiction, I rarely wrote about my medical experiences, but once I started writing poetry, twelve years ago, many of the stories and things I had experienced as an X-ray Tech came back to me.
For me, How Birds Fly focuses on the following subjects: family, hospital life, and birds. Many of the family poems deal with me as a father and as a son and how each presents their own challenges. But there are also poems about my mother and sister and even about being a husband. Also, at the time I was writing the book, I was pretty heavy into birdwatching, so that’s where the bird poems come from. And, of course, hospital life, had already been such a big part of my life that I had all these stories and images tucked away in the back of my head.
Jenna also mentions the simple language in the poems, making them accessible. I read poetry every day and my favorite types of poems are narrative poems, which essentially are poems that tell a story as opposed to being imagistic or image-focused. My fiction background taught me how to tell stories and that the easiest, most straightforward way is with simple language that people can read and relate to.
Again, I wanted to thank Jenna for writing this review and to Our Break Room for giving me a chance to respond and give a little background into the writing of How Birds Fly.