FAIRBANKS - Frank Keim is a poet, longtime Alaskan and lifelong bird watcher who during his decades in Alaska has often set his observations of avian life into verse. Many of these poems have now been collected in his new book, “Voices on the Wind: Poems About Alaska’s Birds, 1979-2007.”

In his work, Keim tends to capture the larger picture more frequently than the smaller details.

Where many nature poets focus on the fine points of a bird’s behavior, Keim is more inclined toward an expansive view that draws in the landscape wherever he might be writing, capturing the many different birds that can be spotted from a single perch if one pays close enough attention.

Thus, in the poem “Miller’s Cabin,” he spies a red-tailed hawk and sandpipers. Aleutian terns, shoveler ducks and semipalmated plovers all inhabit “Nushagak Bay.” Chickadees, ravens and white-fronted geese are found at “The Great Wheel.” “Minto Flats” is alive with fuzzy-feathered owls, scaups, wigeons, sandhill cranes, loons and another red-tailed hawk.

The birds Keim writes of are busily interacting with the environment they dwell in. In “Castle Rocks,” he watches, “Two ravens fly over, / casually prowling / after something / dead, / maybe, / or just playing / chaotically / in the sun and the wind, / punctuating their desultory / trajectory / with sporadic bell croaks, / drifting slowly off / across a shadow valley.”

In “Tell-Tale Sounds,” he observes, “a ptarmigan / chasing his mate / across greening mosses and lichens, / and / under diminutive willows / just now unfurling / impatient spring buds...”

In “Speckle Bellies” he tells how he “spotted their tracks, / a stampede of webbed feet / chasing blueberries across yellowing tufts / of splayed cotton grass on wet snow, / squashing confetti leaves / of dwarf birch / cast away by galing September winds.”

Throughout this book, Keim reminds us of all that can be immediately seen, even if we take a more than cursory glance at our surroundings.

Nature abounds around us, and you needn’t look farther than your window to spot birds providing a show far more intriguing than the television. He wants his readers to get outside and feel their surroundings. His gentle and subtly humorous work quickly encourages just such a response.

While many of Keim’s poems focus on the big picture, he doesn’t avoid the up-close view, particularly when this involves a personal interaction between himself and one of the birds he loves so much.

In “Hawk Owl” he quietly approaches the bird until “his feathered disks swung round / to meet me again, / eyebrow to eyebrow, / only a wing’s breadth between us, / blinking sternly at my embarrassment, / and blinking again, / deliberately / as only owls do, / by now guessing I was no willow or budding alder / waving gingerly in the wind.” The bird, more focused on its next meal than the intrusive human, quickly flies away.

In “Chickadee” he holds a baby bird in his hand and tells it, “I could feel your diminutive heart / tapping furiously against / my thumb, / and I thought it would surely burst, / so I stroked your black topknot / and fuzzy gray belly / till I saw the trepid gleam of fear / disappear, / and you settled your fluffy feathers / softly / in the cup of my palm ...”

In “Gyrfalcon,” one of the most memorable poems in the collection, the bird repeatedly dive bombs Keim’s dog Sam, playing a game by missing the dog’s snout by inches, twirling in the updrafts, then taking a few more swoops at the beleaguered pooch before it finally emits a “a cackle of sheer delight” and “races away like a fat pigeon / and disappears / behind the rocks / till the next time.”

Other creatures besides the winged sort travel through these pages as well, and some of these poems are hardly about birds at all.

But in each there appears at least one of our avian neighbors, sometimes at the center of the scene and sometimes just to the side of the stage. It adds a counterpoint of life that persists on its own way even as the world around it largely misses what’s going on.

A number of these poems are set in human environments. In “Nushagak Bay,” most of those present are focused on the new fishing season and largely oblivious to the sea of bird life above them.

In the quite funny “Commuters,” the refuse cast into the Anchorage dump provides sustenance for ravens. Elsewhere, the food chain runs the opposite direction as people hunt birds for game (Keim offers no judgment on this, he simply observes it as part of our interaction with nature).

In addition to his observations on birds, Keim also has a wonderful eye for landscapes, and he especially shines on his descriptions of the Bering Sea, alongside which he lived for many years. On one page it’s the “great Bering beyond,” on another he describes “the mill grinder / of Bering Sea winds and rains,” and on a third it consists of “choppy black chaos.” These and other evocative images describe that final jumping- off point of our continent.

“Voice on the Wind” offers some fine nature writing. For those hesitant to dive into poetry, it never veers toward the overly sentimental or the confusingly symbolic. Keim simply points to what most of us are too busy with our lives to notice: There’s an entire society dwelling right next to ours, one that can be located in the tree by your doorstep. You don’t have to look hard; you just have to look.

Freelance writer David A. James lives in Fairbanks.
Voices on the Wind By Frank Keim

JS McCarthy Printers

2011

148 pages • $12.95