The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
by Margaret Renkl
In a writing voice mellifluous as a mockingbird, insistent as cidadas, Margaret Renkl praises nature’s changes in each week of a year. Her essays call us to notice and care for Earth’s garden of liveliness, wherever we are.
I turn right to Renkl’s column every Monday in the online New York Times, where she combines nature observations with opinions from her Nashville based southern political perspective. She is an ardent advocate for sensible, compassionate living, for her fellow humans (us!) to straighten up, fly right and act as if we are in relationship with all creatures and living communities—which, in fact (News Flash!) we are.
But she’s a teacher, not a preacher, and she leads by example:
- Researching then trapping to help a fox afflicted with mange;
- Appreciating the rattlesnake staking out prey beneath her loaded blackberry bush;
- Winter-celebrating how “everything that waits is also preparing itself to move.”
Every one of these 52 essays is illustrated by her brother, fine artist Billy Renkl, whose work in collage glorifies this book like the illuminations in medieval texts. In an interview he says, “I wanted the collages to help create an atmosphere within which a reader would encounter (Margaret’s) words.”
They grew up in rural fields and woods, the kind of kids who experienced science and art and life interwoven for real, got in trouble sometimes, and carried forward their childhood bounty into work that benefits many today.
I had the great pleasure of meeting Renkl last fall, when Left Bank Books hosted her to read and sign The Comfort of Crows. Silver haired and matter-of-fact, she was funny—and intense. She calls this book a literary devotional and notes its allegiance to both her joy (in the beauties of the natural world) and grief, because of human-induced nature destruction.
I love reading essays, they are short and to the point, and I so appreciate a viewpoint that can face the uncertainty of our environmental times, without denying or trying to escape, by exploring the truth of Change. Through all seasons, Margaret Renkl chooses this view, inviting us into her hold on the strength, wonder, trepidation, and joy she draws from the master teacher, Nature.
The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year (2023, Spiegel & Grau)
—Jean Ponzi – Green Resources Manager, EarthWays Center of Missouri Botanical Garden