Kyo Maclear

"A writer's search for inspiration, beauty, and solace leads her to birds in this ... meditation on creativity and life"--

A Year of Observation

Birds Art Life

Allison Garber

Another reader described this as a meditation, and I can’t help but feel the same. I didn’t know what I would think of the connection of birding to finding inspiration in your art, but the result was a brilliant read. I so enjoyed this, and was so moved by the author’s poetic prose.

Sarah Sammis

Just what I needed.

Originally I bought the book because I am familiar with Maclear's children's books. Like the musician, I am also an amateur birder and bird photographer.

http://pussreboots.pair.com/blog/2017...

Briar's Reviews

Book Review
Book Title: Birds Art Life: A Year of Observation
Book Author: Kyo Maclear

Introduction: I was craving some inspirational nonfiction, so I decided to pick this book up. I received this book for free through Goodreads First Reads for an honest review.

Review:

"Every love story is a potential grief story" - Kyo Maclear reference - Julian Barnes's Levels of Life.

This book is an inspirational gem that truly surprised me. I never expected a book about watching birds to be one of my favourite reads of the year. There are numerous quotes that are truly amazing from this novel, and now I want to pick up many more Kyo Maclear novels.

I would definitely recommend this book to anyone who needs a pick me up. Difficult topics are discussed within this novel, but it gives you a very different view on life. It's not just a book about birds - it's a book about humans too. While there are facts within this book about birds, it's not just an encyclopedia. Kyo Maclear explains movements throughout life and how changes can be dealt with through analogies, metaphors and similes. Overall, it's a truly impressive book.

The more I read this book, the more I appreciated it. While I might not have been able to relate to every topic discussed in it, I truly felt lifted after reading it. With so many inspirational quotes, it was hard to not put a sticky note on almost every page where I found words that just fit with me.

"Die knowing something. Die knowing your knowing will be incomplete." - Kyo Maclear.

The final two pages of this book gave a list of many, wonderful lessons. Lessons regarding living in general, taking chances, surprises, opening up, relaxation, people, and having a guru in general. Out of this entire book, I felt that these two pages summed the book up better than the synopsis. If you're not going to read the entire book, just reading those two specific pages makes the entire novel worth it.

Final Thoughts: I was truly impressed by this book. I was not expecting to get so attached and feel so desperate to continue reading it. Who knew birds could be so interesting?

Five out of five stars.

rumbledethumps

I love most birding memoirs, but there is a subset that I cannot stand: the I've-discovered-birds-in-middle-age-and-need-to-tell-everyone-about-it memoir. They all take the same form: life has thrown them a curveball, they stumble on to birding, and birding teaches them lessons about life. They discover what every birder already knows (nature is miraculous), and try to convince the reader of this by using flowery prose in an attempt to convey this mundane profundity.

Birds Art Life falls into this subset of birding memoirs. I found myself annoyed or arguing with something on every page. From her being able to distinguish among the 3 swans usually found in North America on one of her first birding trips (not exceptionally difficult, but highly unlikely for a beginner), to the tired cliche of looking at caged birds and musing on the cages we put ourselves in ("The cage of habit. The cage of ego. The cage of ambition. The cage of materialism.")

Throw in the obligatory climate change warnings, mix in anecdotes from life that remind her of the birds she's seen, then add a dash of the oft-told story of the extinction of the passenger pigeon, and you've got the typical How I Discovered Birding in Middle Age memoir.

For a better birding memoir, I recommend Kingbird Highway by Kenn Kaufman, and for a better year-in-the-life of nature type book, I highly recommend A Sand County Almanac by Aldo Leopold.

'Now when I hear birdsong, I feel an entry to that understory. When I am feeling too squeezed on the ground, exhausted by everything in my care, I look for a little sky. There are always birds flying back and forth, city birds flitting around our human edges, singing their songs.' One winter, Kyo Maclear became unmoored. Her father had recently fallen ill and she suddenly found herself lost for words. As a writer, she could no longer bring herself to create; her work wasn't providing the comfort and meaning that it had before. But then Kyo met a musician who loved birds. The musician felt he could not always cope with the pressures and disappointments of being an artist in a big city. When he watched birds and began to photograph them, his worries dissipated. Intrigued, Kyo found herself following the musician for a year, accompanying him on his birdwatching expeditions; the sounds of birds in the city reminded them both to look outwards at the world. Intricate and delicate as birdsong, Birds Art Life Death asks how our passions shape and nurture us, and how we might gain perspective, overcome our anxieties and begin to cherish the urban wild spaces where so many of us live.

Katherine Yang

Kinda into birds right now.

It made sense to me—the focus on the nature growing in the cracks and crevices of urban life—not because we should romanticise human blight and fallout but because, at the end of the day, humanised nature is all that many of us have.

I learned that when it rains, the birds come down from the sky, and that when it rains and you realise you're alive, the rain goes from feeling bleak to feeling refreshing.

I also saw that many of our commonplace notions about beauty are simply wrong-headed—that to say that a love of nature is a function of privilege and wealth, that a delight in small things is incompatible with a passion for justice, is untrue and patronising to the struggling and the poor. Rosa's letters push back against this assumption by showing how far back nature could help, how it had historically helped, to fulfill "the potential dignity and worth of human consciousness". She was not naive. What Rosa believed was that a commitment to social justice, far from being incompatible with aesthetic experience and sensual pleasure, demanded it—that politics has to be about harnessing the libidinal and the beautiful and not only about abstract categories.

Loved the glimpses into birding both as an activity and a metaphor for understanding art life death. Charming, well-crafted, and honest, though not my favourite kind of thing to read.

Jeannette Ordas

I'm returning this book to the library on the weekend, but if it was my own, I'd be highlighting passages and re-reading the dickens out of it. So good. A perfect read if you're interested in art, life and birds and even if it's only 1 of the 3, you'll probably find so much to be inspired by. Loved it.

Birds Art Life A Year of Observation

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