“Like Moths to a Flame”: Reading the Animal ‘Other’ in Harry Thurston’s Icarus, Falling of Birds

Leonor María Martínez Serrano

doi:10.14198/raei.28776

Authors

Leonor María Martínez Serrano Universidad de Córdoba, Spain https://orcid.org/0000-0002-5114-9513

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.14198/raei.28776

Keywords:

Harry Thurston, ecopoetry, more-than-human world, Anthropocene, songbirds, species extinction, myth

Abstract

Canadian ecopoet and naturalist Harry Thurston has spent a whole lifetime paying attention to the more-than-human world, which has resulted in poetry collections and non-fiction books on environmental issues. Drawing on Serenella Iovino’s notion of “non-anthropocentric humanism” and Giorgio Agamben’s thinking on (non)human life and the Western distinction between human and animal, this paper proposes an ecocritical reading of the poetry collection Icarus, Falling of Birds (2017), a 12-part poem that mourns an environmental catastrophe that killed 7,500 to 10,000 songbirds of twenty-six species on the night of September 13, 2013. As Thurston explains, the tragic event happened as a flock of migratory songbirds on their journey southwards was attracted to a mesmerising flare column at a gas plant in Saint John, New Brunswick. Killed by the flames, the falling of these birds recalls, to Thurston’s mind, Icarus’s fall in the Graeco-Roman myth as his wax wings melted in approaching the sun. Upon closer inspection, the poem reveals itself as an accomplished palimpsest woven out of sources as varied as Ovid’s Metamorphoses, Dante’s Divine Comedy, Emerson’s essay “The Poet,” and several scientific works on songbirds. This paper argues that, in piecing all these textual threads together, and countering an anthropocentric conceptualisation of songbirds, Thurston is voicing a deft denunciation of humans’ disregard for nonhuman animals and their ferocious overexploitation of natural resources in capitalist societies, which is leading to alarming species extinction.

Funding

This article was written under the umbrella of the Project PID2023-147494NB-I00, funded by the Ministry of Science, Innovation and Universities, the State Investigation Agency, and the FEDER.

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