Passings - by Holly J Hughes (Paperback)

About the Book

In this timely collection of elegies, award-winning poet Holly J. Hughes gives voice to 15 bird species that no longer fill our skies. "In poems at once heartbreaking and illuminating, Holly Hughes gives extinction a very personal face," writes environmental editor Lorraine Anderson. Recipient of a 2017 American Book Award.

Book Synopsis

Passenger pigeon. Carolina parakeet. Eskimo curlew. In this timely collection of elegies, award-winning poet Holly J. Hughes gives voice to these and other bird species that no longer fill our skies. If their names sound a litany of the hundreds of species we've lost, these fifteen poems serve as a reminder that their stories are still with us, offering a cautionary tale for the many species whose habitats face threats from climate change. In her afterword, Hughes reminds us that it's not too late to learn from these birds' extinction and take action to protect the species that remain. "Take note," she writes. "These birds are still singing to us. We must listen."

"In poems at once heartbreaking and illuminating, Holly Hughes gives extinction a very personal face," writes environmental editor Lorraine Anderson. "She makes it clear that the bell tolls not only for the fifteen species she elegizes, but for us as well." Recipient of an American Book Award from the Before Columbus Foundation in 2017, the first printing of Passings by Expedition Press sold out. Wandering Aengus Press is honored to bring this chapbook back into print and give the birds a voice again.

Review Quotes

In poems at once heartbreaking and illuminating, Holly Hughes gives extinction a very personal face. She makes it clear that the bell tolls not only for the fifteen species she elegizes, but for us as well. Her words prompt us to love and revere the beauty and music of the birds still left, and to remember their well-being in all the choices we make.

--Lorraine Anderson

editor of Earth & Eros: A Celebration in Words & Photographs

"No one knows for sure you're gone," Holly Hughes writes of the Eskimo curlew. Most of its fellows on this ex-life list, rarae aves no longer, are aves extincta. But they've not gone from the scene without grace. Even their names are poems--O'o, dodo, great auk, Spix's macaw--and names, thanks to Passings, that will remain on the wing as long as there are lips to say them.

--Robert Michael Pyle

author of Evolution of the Genus Iris: Poems

This is a heartbreaking and illuminating memorial to all the birds that we have lost, a painful memorial in an era of extinctions, climate change, and destruction of the Amazon rainforest that asks us to think about which birds we're losing in our own backyards, our own neighborhoods.

--Ginny Lim

Before Columbus Foundation Board Member

American Book Awards Ceremony, October 22, 2017

I can't say enough good things about Holly J. Hughes's beautiful chapbook Passings. Each of its fifteen poems mourns the extinction of a bird, some familiar like the dodo and ivory-billed woodpecker, others unknown to me--'til now--including the elephant bird and paradise parrot. In a curious way, Hughes brings these lost creatures back to life through the precision of her language and the vivid evocations only poetry can deliver. The birds live, at least, on the page, if not on earth. I found myself all the more deeply moved for their absence from the world. That absence, of course, is in no small part--maybe entirely so--due to human activity, including climate disruption, whether for the demand for colorful feathers for women's hats or for food or because of the eradication of habitats. There's a sobering lesson in these sad brief poems. History, ornithology, poetry--it's all here. To all my birder friends out there, order this book now. Ditto if you're a non-birder.

--Ed Harkness

author of The Law of the Unforeseen

The poems reflect Pound's dictum about the luminous detail--just the pith and gist--so there's just enough information, but not too much. The reader gets these flashes of imagery. At the end of each poem, after getting to know the bird, when the bird is gone, we feel it. It's really gone.

--Mike Dillon

"A Quiet Letter to the World: An Interview with Holly J. Hughes"

Rain Taxi, Fall 2016 print edition