What Begins with Bird
Noy Holland
FC2, 2005
1-57366-125-2
$15.95 (paperback)
155 pages

I love dark, gritty, raw fiction, fiction that gets at the truth with a sickle and convulsions. But I also want my fiction to be beautiful. What Begins with Bird is just that, a book of bitter, elegant imagery. You’d think Noy Holland is a poet or painter turned fiction writer, but in fact she is a fiction writer who pays close attention to the use of language in constructing images. Those images are of husbands and wives, siblings, mothers and children. Holland’s exploration of familial relationships scratches at the reader’s emotions and memories, while still managing to keep the reader as witness and not participant.

Holland’s first book, The Spectacle of the Body, was published by Knopf in 1995 and was nominated for the National Book Award. What Begins with Bird is her first book in ten years, published by Fiction Collective Two. Between her two books, she published several stories and became a professor at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, where she is now the director of the MFA program.

In the first (and longest) story, “what begins with bird,” the main character has recently given birth to a son and receives a visit from her troubled, younger sister. She is torn between the conflicting desires of helping her sister and protecting her baby: “Too much for me already. I gather him up. Remember to kiss her. I remember the place at the bend in her arm Mother used to rub before Sister slept, to help her sleep, and I touch it.” There is no resolution at the end of the story, which may bother readers of standard, plot-driven books. Works of fiction are often just forays into stories that began before the first line and continue past the last. In the same way, family relationships are often continually tense and problems are not resolved simply because it’s the end of the day.

In each of her six stories, Holland weaves together soil, kinship, creatures, and change. “There are chickens to feed and cow Maggie. Two cobs twice for Maggie. There are board fences sure to creosote and thistle to dig from the fields when it bolts before the purple crowns. I muck the stalls and soap the tack and vet Pa’s dogs they run the fields flushing birds all day. I am his girl Cricket. I climb the big oak on the hill Pa’s hill even after when it is hit and burns and the burn blacks my skin my clothes.” Rather than creating redundant prose, she uses those common elements differently in each story and is thereby able to craft a coherent and absorbing collection. I recommend What Begins with Bird to readers who are open to truly creative writing, who want to be immersed in images of people and nature, who want to be both lulled and struck by language.

Read an exerpt here.

Kudos to Lou Robinson on yet another gorgeous cover design.