By Margaret Renkl; reviewed by Jeannette Hartman
This is one of those wonderful — and yes, comforting — books that asks you to pause and pay attention.
Week by week, beginning in December, Margaret Renkl writes about what can be seen in her yard in Nashville, nearby walking trails and parks or in the woods surrounding a friend’s cabin on the Cumberland Plateau.
She writes about the greening of the winter-deadened world as spring unfurls into summer and the abundance of berries and seeds as autumn approaches.
Immersing herself in the natural world, she writes, “is the way I cope with whatever I think I cannot bear. I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too.”
She talks about the destructive character of traditional suburban lawns that require poisons to maintain and provide little habitat or food for native wildlife.
And the poisons used by one neighbor spread on the air and into the water. They end up in the bodies of people, insects and birds. In the human world they are linked to asthma, Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, autism and cancers. In the natural world, they set off a chain of death from prey to predator.
Her own yard is the despair of the neighbors: ragged with weedy native plants, designed to feed birds and bees and resist drought.
She describes her brother’s garden journal that combines art with field notes: “The years are layered one upon another — notes from a specific date in one year sharing the same space with notes from the same date a decade earlier — in an abundant approximation of the way the garden itself experiences time.”
From inside her house she compares the mild, quiet light of October with the “thin light of winter or the sparkling light of spring or the unrelenting light of summer.” She describes the “crow light” of autumn: “Light that gleams on glossy black feathers and makes of the crow, a breathing, living, winging, crow-talking god. The light that renders a crow incandescent in the afternoon is the same light that only minutes later tenders the gift of twilight, when colors fade and all the world becomes a crow.”
She describes her book as a witnessing of what is — and that which maybe passing as climate change alters nature.
THE COMFORT OF CROWS is poignant and poetic. Renkle’s descriptions of the nature around her are closely observed and gem-like. She writes objectively of the cruelty of predators and the sustaining interdependence of the various players in the natural world.
This is a book that will bring you peace and awe as you move through your own world and year.
THE COMFORT OF CROWS won the 2024 Southern Book Prize.
Other books that bring readers close to nature include THE SALT PATH, WALKING HOME, WINTERING, and TRAIL OF THE LOST.
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The Author: Margaret Renkle
An essayist and contributing opinion writer for The New York Times, Margaret Renkl is the author of GRACELAND, AT LAST: NOTES ON HOPE AND HEARTACHE FROM THE AMERICAN SOUTH and LATE MIGRATIONS: A NATURAL HISTORY OF LOVE AND LOSS.
In addition, she is the founding editor of Chapter 16, a daily literary publication of Humanities Tennessee.
A graduate of Auburn University and the University of South Carolina, she lives in Nashville.
