The Warbler Road

"The twenty-six short essays collected in The Warbler Road record Merrill Gilfillan's wanderings in 'the sweet gregarious' spaces of North American warblers. These tiny birds are 'leisurely' in their days and ways, 'with not a hurry in the world'; a flock of yellow-rumps moves 'luxuriantly' when one is lucky enough to see them. Watching and waiting requires ample leisure, too. It is a privilege 'reclaimed in the name of the wandering useless,' as Gilfillan puts it in an essay from the excellent earlier collection Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains. Gilfillan's is a practice of guiltless delectation resistant to both the ironic postures and the embittered political critique familiar in contemporary poetic and intellectual culture."

~Dustin Simpson, Chicago Review

"Reading the twenty-six prose sketches about wood warblers gathered in The Warbler Road, I couldn't help wondering how much the precision of Gilfillan's poetic diction owes to birding, which the poet has pursued for most of his sixty-five years. Birding demands attention to the details of earth and sky, one ear drift-feeding on the murmurings of a specific habitat, the other pitched for an outburst of song that the eyes trace to a flash of color alighting on a branch or a smudgy silhouette in underbrush shadows . . . For Gilfillan, birding and writing poems are acts of casual grace, a sorting and weighing of the earth's erosions and migrations, of the songs nesting on the air and in the ear."

~John Palattella, The Nation

"If anyone writes better prose in America I am unaware of it."

~Jim Harrison