Comfort, solace, meaning in our friends from the sky

It is easy to decipher the wonderment of poet Tom Crawford in his collection “The Names of Birds.” His admiration for birds shines through in this collection of poems about winged creatures.

Crawford’s poems are mini-stories that recount moments of observation of birds with and without humans around, of delight, of marvel and of self reflection.

In the opening poem “It’s Such a Relief to Want Less,” the Santa Fe poet writes of the Sharp-shinned hawk, which is not greedy because he eats only one tiny sparrow each day.

	“The Names of Birds, Poems” by Tom Crawford, foreword by David James Duncan Sherman Asher Publishing, $14.95, 141 pp.

The poem evolves into a recollection of his family on never having “the quiet habit of bird watching” and never having a bird feeder because the family didn’t stay in one place long enough. As a result, the family members missed out. They didn’t hear “the songs our own silence might bring.”

In the poem “Harriet,” Crawford writes “One day Harriet came to our feeder/ (Mary named her Harriet)/Bird with a Green Hat,/Vermeer would say/a dapper bird among the locals./A bold, little parrot/in the wild.” Mary is the poet’s wife.

Crawford, a Santa Fe resident, combines whimsy with introspection in the poem “To Make an Owl Make a Poem.” It begins with directions on sculpting an owl out of clay. That segues into using a poem to sculpt an owl. In his foreword, David James Duncan notes that Crawford’s use of poetry to observe or imitate birds is a “very ancient, very powerful form of exchange. The solace birds embody via song, plumage and behavior is almost unchanging in a world of sickeningly rapid change.”

Tom Crawford discusses, signs “The Names of Birds” at 5 p.m. Wednesday, Jan. 18, at Garcia Street Books, 376 Garcia St., Santa Fe.