Diary of a Left-Handed Birdwatcher (Harvest Book) - Softcover

Dr. Leonard E. Nathan, (November 8 1924 - June 3, 2007) was an American poet, critic, and professor emeritus of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley where he retired in 1991.

Born in El Monte, California, Nathan earned a bachelor's degree in English at UC Berkeley in 1950, a master's degree in English in 1952 and a Ph.D. in 1961. He was then hired as a lecturer in UC Berkeley's Department of Speech, and was promoted to associate professor in 1965 and to professor in 1968.

Among other honors, he received the National Institute of Arts and Letters prize for poetry, a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Phelan Award for Narrative Poetry, and three silver medals from the Commonwealth Club of California, including one for The Potato Eaters. His poems were also published in The New Yorker, The Atlantic, New England Review and The Georgia Review, among other publications.

``It's a sort of . . . well . . . meditation on birdwatching,'' explains Nathan (Returning Your Call, 1975, etc.) to a friend interested in his latest writing venture. Well, yes, to put it mildly. Nathan is a poet of some repute, but let's be frank: Birds are what fire this guy's imagination. In spying them, he experiences their ``rare and real presence.'' Had he religious inclinations, he might have let their epiphanic qualities fashion him into a true believer. But he was not willing to surrender his sacred experiences with birds to the ether; he wanted to seize these epiphanies, take their measure. To that end he has collected, in brief concentrated episodes, a swarm of birdish thing: remembrances of delightful days afield with his bird-watching group, Thursday's Children; snippets of relevant bird poetry from Robert Frost to the Indian sage Valmiki to Walt Whitman; delicious tidbits, such as a description of the magnificent Aztec aviary the Spanish discovered when they reached Mexico City; the use of three field guides at once, ``enabling you to triangulate the bird, to come a little closer to its reality perhaps''; forays after tips received from the bird hotline; an ongoing disputation with his good friend Lewis, an ornithologist, about the exact meaning of his quest, an exchange that forces Nathan to get specific; and a superb telling of the apocryphal adventures of Virgilio Stampari, an imaginary 15th-century Italian explorer and collector of strange and wonderful bird lore. It is a mighty challenge, this effort to communicate with the ineffable, but Nathan never shirks. No smoky similitudes will do- -only luminous clarity. And while, like the furtive yellow rail, the big picture is elusive, the glimpses allowed Nathan are worth everything. -- Copyright ©1996, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.