I HAVE NOT read There Are Things We Live Among, but I have a feeling that book is the closest analogue to this one in Moxley's corpus. Each chapter in For the Good of All, Do Not Destroy the Birds looks closely at a (usually famous) poem (or other literary text) about a bird, stirring in some of Moxley's own experiences with or observations of birds and a few reflections on her own poetry. Hardy's thrush, Tennyson's swan, Whitman's mocking-bird...but with some surprises, like Félicité's parrot in Flaubert's Un Coeur Simple, Creeley's nightingale rather than Keats's, a bird-man out of one of Max Ernst's collages, and an opera or two.
The book may be too literary for people who like to read about birds and too avian-centric to make much dent as literary criticism, but I read it just because I like Jennifer Moxley's writing, so I was quite happy with it.
As apparent also in her memoir The Middle Room, poet Moxley writes great prose. The sensibility and landscape are contemporary, roughly, but the grace and poise in the prose hearken back to a pre-Didion, pre-Hemingway pace and amplitude--like Pater (but not as perfumed) or Ruskin (but lighter on its feet) or Newman. Moxley has, like the rest of us, read her Adorno et al., but she steers well away from anything that sounds like jargon. Her prose breathes a more oxygenated atmosphere than we usually get in lit crit, and I am grateful.
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