Hawk and Songbird: Poems
Ebook
Pandemic at full tilt, the diagnosis came--cancer. Maybe you've known crisis or are walking a loved one through the terrible unknown. The heart plummets. The mind shrills. We blame genetics. Toxins. Lifestyle. How can we not blame ourselves? Can this be thrown on God?
If we listen to the emptiness behind every unanswered why, what will we hear? While life and death circle overhead, heckle and intimidate, exhausting faith, these poems talk with touchstones around us. Eavesdrop on whispers for answers. These poems explore what we have--and what's left. Who made the hawk? And the lionhearted songbird? What do they tell us about courage? What else is present?
“Keep eye contact with these poems. Susan Cowger pioneers the lamentable animal wilderness of suffering and reports back with language that coheres where there seemed only incoherence. Cowger conducts the passage through the ambivalence and confusion of pain with great care, such that, as we attend to these poems, we discover ourselves to be loved and tended well by both the poet and her Lord.”
—Matthew Clark, author of Only the Lover Sings
“A book of flight, dive, trill, and shriek, Susan Cowger’s bold and riveting collection on cancer, Hawk and Songbird, takes away our breath and then infuses us with Spirit. These luminous poems brim with birds and tremble with omnipresent Coyote. Yet, in the midst of ‘animal pain,’ the poet also howls love of family, friends, and the Divine. Even in ‘darkness / darker than the darkness / of before,’ Cowger’s necessary words rise and soar.”
—Marjorie Maddox, author of In the Museum of My Daughter’s Mind
“Master word-crafter Susan Cowger gives her readers ‘permission by example’ for asking hard questions and living into them for answers bigger than words. It takes courage to ask and courage to receive the reply, but the asking and receiving is worth every moment of the conversation. As a seasoned and gracious sherpa, Cowger companions us into the greater unknowns faced by every mortal who hopes to live well and love deeply.”
—Lancia E. Smith, publisher and executive director, Cultivating Oaks Press
“With equal parts transparency and generosity, Susan Cowger scatters her verses like birdseed to nourish the reader who marvels at the call and response of faith despite the roving shadow of predatory illness. This isn’t just seed for the feeding, but also the planting, ‘as God’s promises run after us all / with a spade’ to turn the hard soil of our hearts and help us see afresh that ‘Being alive is a gate made of pearl.’”
—Bradford Winters, showrunner and poet
- Title: Hawk and Songbird: Poems
- Author: Susan Cowger
- Publisher: Cascade Books
- Print Publication Date: 2024
- Logos Release Date: 2024
- Language: English
- Resources: 1
- Format: Digital › Ebook
- ISBNs: 9798385212019, 9798385212002, 9798385211999
- Resource ID: LLS:9798385212019
- Resource Type: Monograph
- Metadata Last Updated: 2024-03-04T21:41:04Z
Susan Cowger, poet and visual artist, focuses on images that represent the human condition. Her book Slender Warble was released in 2020. Her poems have appeared in books including A Tale of Two Trees (2023) and In a Strange Land: Introducing Ten Kingdom Poets (2019). Others have been published in Ekstasis, Fathom, Presence, Mockingbird, and Scarab Hiding, a chapbook (2006). Cowger is founder and editor emeritus of the journal Rock & Sling. Contact her at susan@susancowger.com.