Rick Smith's 34 poems combine object/concept (man is wren/wren is man) in an extended conceit (I will say, metaphysical, because it is not the Petrarchan comparison, "eyes like diamonds, lips like cherries;" rather, it is a genuine attempt at analogue). Though only eight poems present wren qua wren, the reader so willing suspends disbelief, that all the poems seem atwitter ~ aflutter - with wing and air, with images of nest and flight. The real wren, like man, is everywhere: in China and on a saguaro cactus; in Philadelphia (inside a couch) and in Ireland (St. Stephen's Day); and also, "I finally saw the Sign of the Wren / between my son's eyes it was / on the day / of the blue jay audition." Granting leeway for an updating of milieu - for our divided, fragmented world - I think John Donne would happily tip his hat to Rick Smith's elaborate, elegant, many-sided metaphors.

There are no titles to the poems (there is an index of first lines); but after two vignettes of bird, of man, the narrator begins to build the analogue in "I write what I can remember. I make notes, keep":
        Wren hears the music before he is born. It is inside
        the wood, the rocks, the fiber. The music is in
        predawn Wren; it betrays his hiding place among the
        branches of a nightshade plant over the loading dock.

And so, the adroit interweaving continues throughout the book. There are many very beautiful lyrics of wren/man: "If I can only find / St Francis, / even a replica, I'll climb into those loving arms / and let them make me into wood." And in another poem, "Wings folded, eyes unblinking / a little fascinated / a little cold. // Cold makes me die. // In my mind. I'm flying /on the edge of sorrow / but I can outrun that cloud."

There are many beautiful lyrics of wren: "(The largest wren in / North America is / the Cactus Wren). / A small spoiled owl / looks like a big brother / and plays a deadly hide-and-seek" In another poem, on "An estate near Philadelphia. / A pair of Carolina Wrens / enter the sitting room / through a window... / build their nest / in the back of an upholstered sofa." Yet whether the poems are on man or on wren, each assertion of the complex metaphors will draw the characteristics - the life, the "worries' - of one into the other (bird into man/man into bird).

Of the last three poems in The Wren Notebook, two act as crescendo - and the final - fretful - poem, as coda:
        In celebration of St. Stephen's Day.
        Wren is hung by the legs.
        The Wren Boys wander through Dublin
        chanting and holding a mobile
        of dead wrens.

The poem continues in hard-edged images which imply a grotesque, bloody fate. It is. of course, the arguable poem within the woven metaphysic (metaphysics, of necessity, is all argument)! I think I will opt for the more loving images of the penultimate poem: "always picture me near the music / and the dance, / right where life begins. / in a sky of China blue," because, obviously, it is nearer Hope. Trust and Faith.

In any case, The Wren Notebook is wonderful and amazing: a Pushcart Prize in 2000, for those who are thinking carefully!

This is the first book in a new Lummox Press series called Little Red Book Master, and is superbly illustrated with pen-and-ink drawings by Judith Bever. Many kudos to the Lummox Press, whose editor is RD Armstrong.