Book Review: The Bird Room by Dawn Gorman Turns Grief into Wingbeat Memory and Tender Resistance

Dawn Gorman’s The Bird Room, published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press, is a devastating modern poetry collection that builds its emotional gravity out of absence, presence, and the fine bones of remembrance. This is grief as a field guide, a slow unfurling of one woman’s way of cataloguing loss through the life and legacy of her birdwatcher father. But don’t mistake this for a pastoral elegy or soft-focus nature writing. Gorman’s poems arrive with binoculars in hand, sharp with insight, laced with precise tenderness, and utterly unafraid to look long and hard into the light of familial estrangement and reconciliation.

The collection’s anchor piece, The Bird Room, sets the tone with quiet authority. “There were no birds here, / just books about them,” Gorman writes, introducing the titular space as a metaphor for emotional proximity and distance, inheritance and omission. The child’s bed is literally “squeezed into a corner,” her borders self-drawn for survival, the drawers filled not with life but the “unlived chicks / bobbing on perfect, cotton wool sea.” It’s an image that holds the collection’s paradox: love as something once-removed, documented rather than directly experienced, catalogued but not shared.

Later, in Five Forint, this dissonance turns ecological and elegiac. The poet contrasts her father’s encyclopaedic, archival approach to birding with the world’s environmental unraveling. “The marshes are forgetting too, / drying out,” she observes, while a man “not a proper birder” tells her of great white egrets adapting to breed in new places. The poem applauds the bird’s resilience but it’s also about dislodging the rigid certainties inherited from a father whose identity was built on expertise. “I love them for challenging what you knew,” she writes. It’s a subtle declaration of independence, a daughter claiming her own observational lens.

Family: Diomedeidae is a masterstroke of lyric memoir. Gorman recounts her father’s joy at spotting a black-browed albatross and deftly weaves this memory into the moment of his death. His final hallucination is of another albatross, visible only to him. “You know you are somewhere special / when you get an albatross in the bins,” he once wrote. By the end, this sentiment becomes a symbolic release: “I will look up then… imagine / what might be there unseen.” Here, the poetic craft is rich with metaphor but grounded in emotional specificity. It’s a line that will sit with readers long after the book is closed.

The final poem, Your Binoculars, is a softly spoken body blow. Gorman inherits her father’s Leica 10x42s, and with them, a weight of expectation she knows she’ll never meet. “I know I’ll never / lift them to feel the same thrill you had,” she admits, but what she’s really searching for is “not in the bird books.” The closing lines, “Maybe it was in your heart. / Maybe it’s in mine.”, are a poetic summation of the entire collection’s emotional trajectory: not closure, but co-existence with what’s gone, what’s left, and what still sings through the trees.

The Bird Room stands out in contemporary poetry for its resistance to spectacle. It’s a modest book that carries immense weight, not with drama but with delicacy. In an age of digital overload and curated grief, Gorman offers a deeply human, analog ritual of loss, observed, not broadcast. The poems are compact, emotionally meticulous, and culturally resonant. For readers of contemporary poetry and literary memoir, this is essential reading. For those navigating inheritance, loss, or strained parental legacies, it’s a companion, whispering, gently: look closer, it’s there.

About the Author

Dawn Gorman is a creative writing tutor, mentor and therapeutic arts practitioner. She is Poetry Editor of Caduceus and presents The Poetry Place on West Wilts Radio. Her five poetry publications include two Pushcart-Prize nominated pamphlets, most recently Aloneness is a Many-Headed Bird (Hedgehog, 2020), a ‘conversation-in-poetry’ with Rosie Jackson.