MHR: First, l I want to congratulate you on Lost Birds of the Iron Range. The collection is exquisite and the poems are pristine. Can you give us some of the backstories of birds/mines which work to structure the poems?

AE: Thank you so much! This collection started as a love letter to the wild landscape of Michigan’s Upper Peninsula where I live. The area has a history of mining and logging that drew large numbers of European immigrants to the area in the 1800s, so the book is also a love letter to migration: the places we are from and the places we go, the things we bring with us, and what we leave behind. And that’s what I imagine the mythological birds to be—the objects of both the old and new lands, one always ceding to the other as cultures arrive and change and merge.

MHR: Can you speak to the imagined historical time that these poems would take place? What land encompasses the Iron Range as you envision it?

AE: The real-life Iron Range spans much of the Upper Peninsula and all along Lake Superior. In the U. P., the peak of modern mining was the mid-1800s, which is when I imagine much of my book’s history to occur. This is the time of the birds and the young woman whose journey we follow.  I have also included poems from the perspective of The Historian and the Historian’s Apprentice, who are from the present, looking back on the past and speculating.

MHR: What are your ideas of why poets are attracted to writing about birds? Do you believe myth plays a part in this? How were you drawn to write these poems?

AE: Oh gosh, birds are so common but also so otherworldly, aren’t they? I know “poets writing about birds” is a cliché, but I also think cultures have been exploring the idea of birds for millennia, so I doubt any of us are giving up soon! (When Nicci Mechler at Porkbelly Press sent me my acceptance for this book, she noted that it was one of several bird collections she had received. Eek!) I hadn’t intended to write a collection initially. It was just one poem (I forget which one, or if that one even made it into the final draft), but after the first poem, they just started flowing, each one inspiring the next.

MHR: Were any of these poems inspired by dreams?

AE: Only the waking dream of living in this place! I am answering these questions half a mile down the road from a place literally called The Yooper Tourist Trap, which boasts a giant chainsaw out front, as tall as a house. The chainsaw’s name is Big Gus. And then there are the ethereally beautiful stretches of wilderness: waterfalls and winding trails through cedars and the untamable shore of Lake Superior. And then there’s the way the wilderness is interrupted by the eerie, terraced mines on the horizon. So, none of the poems were inspired by actual dreams, but there’s something very surreal about living here.

MHR: There is a line in “The Historian’s Apprentice Shares a Secret,” that reads “what is written removed from what is true.” What guides you to remove language to uphold structure and sense in a poem?

AE: Oh, that’s a great question! I often find that I tend toward too many words when my core words aren’t quite right—when they aren’t “what is true.” If my noun is off, or my verb, then I try to nudge them into the right direction with adjectives and adverbs and metaphors. Lately, my goal has been to cut away all of that, to cut down to the barest essence of what I am trying to say. My poems have gotten very small lately, something closer to silence.

MHR: Birds seem to take on mystical qualities in these poems. Did this liberate your language and enable you to be visionary while grounding the work in the various narratives? Did you find that the mystery of birds allowed for the poems to transcend the mundane?

AE: It really did. A few years ago, I read an essay by poet Fleda Brown where she lamented that her poems often stayed too close to the shore, and I wanted to use these poems as an opportunity to explore the more “out-there” waters for myself. The poems let me take more mundane elements—the scent of cardamom found in traditional Finnish bread, for example, or the mending of clothes—and couple them with these mythological birds. It was such a freeing exercise.
MHR: You have two poems, “Motherland I” and “Motherland II” What is the journey to which you allude?

AE: These poems follow a young woman as she leaves Finland with her husband so he can work in the Upper Peninsula’s copper mines. Those were some of the last poems I wrote for the collection (I think I originally had twenty-seven before paring it down for Porkbelly’s micro-chapbook contest), and I hope they helped to ground the themes of migration and home with the experience of one specific character.

MHR: How can someone purchase your chapbook?

AE: Lost Birds of the Iron Range is available through Porkbelly Press: https://porkbellypress.com/catalog/micro-chapbooks/2017-series/edmondson/

MHR: Thank you for taking the time to respond to our questions.

Amber Edmondson is a poet and book artist who lives in Michigan’s
Upper Peninsula. Her work has appeared in publications such as Diode
Poetry Journal, Menacing Hedge, and MockingHeart Review. She is the
author of two chapbooks: Darling Girl (dancing girl press 2016) and
Lost Birds of the Iron Range (Porkbelly Press 2017).