Max Porter's Crow: Wisdom for a Time of Uncertainty

I just read Max Porter’s Grief is the Thing with Feathers for a writing workshop with the extraordinary writer and teacher Sabrina Orah Marks. (If you have not read her column in the Paris Review, read here: link ).  The theme for the workshop is Obsession; specifically unearthing what you do not know about your own obsessions. This is rich soil for anyone, writer, or not. So many different angles to come down with a shovel to uncover that weirdly familiar but still elusive scent of hidden personal landscapes. 

Porter’s book is a marvel. I am better for having read it, which might sound strange since I don’t quite know how I am better. Just like I don’t quite know what I don’t know about any of my obsessions. Evidently living in a time of uncertainty, which the global pandemic has created for everyone, has opened up some space in my own processing and I am suddenly okay with not knowing how to respond or even how to answer self-awareness prompts, which I confess was a former obsession. 

I am not alone in my praise of this book, as critics have demonstrated their own obsession. The front cover of Grief is the Thing with Feathers is filled with endorsements and blurbs proclaiming how its “a luminous reading experience,” or “amazing and unforgettable.” My own endorsement is that it is inventive, unique, and highly original even though there is much borrowed from the biographies of other well known poets. This is a high-line trapeze act done well. Perhaps that’s why there are three full ‘praise pages’ for its slim one hundred and fourteen pages. Every notable reviewer is essentially giving a standing ovation for its strength and agility, and Porter’s down-right impressive feat in the center ring.

For starters, the title is borrowed and adapted from Emily Dickinson’s poem “Hope is the Thing with Feathers.”

Hope is the thing with feathers (254)

Emily Dickinson - 1830-1886

Hope is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land,
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me.

 

In Porter’s title Grief replaces Hope, and is a crow. Rather Crow is a featured character who is attracted to grief and lives with a recently widowed father and his two young sons. There are direct connections to the notable poets Ted Hughes and Sylvia Plath, and another literary Crow (Hughes’ own work that he wrote while in grief following Plath’s suicide), and yet this story stands alone in its telling even if you were not aware of the literary epigenetics. Three narrative voices share the pages: Boys, Dad (a Ted Hughes scholar), and Crow. And together they process grief and time until the Crow is no longer needed. 

 Crow cares for the Boys and the Dad, as much as “the little bird that kept so many warm” from Emily’s poem, but he does not entertain with sweet tunes. Crow wants to be acknowledged from the first few pages, in fact, demands that Dad properly greet him by name. This is significant for any grieving household: To name and allow yourself to be present with your own or collective grief starts the process. The respect that Crow devotes to both the Dad and the Boys’ grief is complicated, as the Crow is known as well as a trickster. Crow has raw insights and methods, but his appraisal of how obsessive grief made connoisseurs of the boys in how to miss their mother is one of the many gems that Porter has scattered throughout the book.  

            

Some dads do this, some dads do that. Some natural

                        Evil, some fairly kind. 

            Pollarded, bollarded, was-it-ever-thus. Elastic snaps, a

                        Sniff and a sneeze and we’re gone. 

            Coppiced, to grow well.

            Connoisseurs, they were, of how to miss a mother. 

                        My absolute pleasure.

            Just be good and listen to birds.

            Long live imagined animals, the need, the capacity. 

            Just be kind and look out for your brother. (p110)

 

Crow’s silent farewell to the family is one we could all amend and apply to ourselves. In this time of unprecedented uncertainty, there is undoubtedly grief in the land, in each nations’ psyche, and in each household as humanity absorbs the changes before us. It’s ok to name it grief, or Crow, or to move towards Hope, or to recognize the wisdom of being coppiced, to grow well.  

And perhaps this is why I feel I am better off for having experienced this “sad and strange and splendid” * book. I can somewhat comprehend that all of us, in collective and individual ways, have experienced being pruned back in order to grow better in the future. Let’s continue to look after each other while the shearing and clearing proceeds.


*(according to Sara Baume, Guardian Books of the Year)

Review from the Guardian: link

Grief is The Thing With Feathers by Max Porter, Faber & Faber Ltd., 2015 website

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