Birdwatching in Wartime

Jeffrey Thomson's award-winning fourth collection of poems, 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 cobine 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. A striking new collection that Major Jackson hails as "thinking that become sensuous."

Poet and translator, Jeffrey Thomson, is the author of three previous collections of poetry, including Renovation, The Country of Lost Sons, and The Halo Brace. An associate professor of creative writing at the University of Maine Farmington, he has won fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Pennsylvania Council on the Arts, and, most recently, was named the 2008 Individual Arts Fellow in the Literary Arts by the Maine Arts Commission.