WILD BIRDSONG

Wild Birdsong – now available from Lulu Press! 

“In her latest collection, Jane Beal employs Japanese forms to frame her distinctive American observations. From city to forest, the birdsongs she collects ring clear and resound deep in the reader. Her poems, plain speaking and uncluttered, speak directly of everyday experience, yet shimmer with the apprehension of the numinous. Like the birds she addresses in Mercy-Robins, Beal’s poems act as a bridge between the earthly and the spiritual, until even the apparently simple assertion that ‘Life goes on and on’ (Spring Promise) becomes more than comforting reassurance, taking on a celebratory expansiveness as large as the sky that surrounds her subjects.” ~ Oz Hardwick, author of The Illuminated Dreamer

“‘Hear me! Stones have a song inside.’ So says Jane Beal in the opening poem to her new collection.  In these poems, deft and restrained amalgams of prose and haiku, Beal shows her willingness over and over again to plunge—with an affecting compassion—into the heart of each small thing to discover the songs it contains. Here, seagulls bicker and snicker, here vireos choir. Birds become in Beal’s handling winged revelators, angelic confirmations of the immanence of glory in this wondrous, wild, and skittish world. Beal’s jubilant poems show her to be a true peregrine, circling wide-eyed into fresh knowing.” ~ Kim Johnson, poet & author of A Metaphorical God

“Dr. Jane Beal sees the grace and the fallen from grace. But, just as nature is pregnant with life, Jane Beal’s Wild Birdsong reminds us that many things in life are pregnant with meaning: sorrows, joys, delights. All are, for the seeing, sacramental.” ~ Dr. Jerry Root, author of The Soul of C.S. Lewis