Jet Fuel Review
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025
Picture

Book Review: Audubon’s Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems ​by Juditha Dowd
 
Juditha Dowd
Audubon’s Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems
Rose Metal Press, 2020
ISBN: 978-1941628218
144 pages
$15.95


Juditha Dowd is the author of Mango in Winter (Grayson Books, 2013), as well as the chapbooks What Remains (Finishing Line Press, 2009), The Weathermancer (Finishing Line Press, 2006), and Back Where We Belong (Casa de Cinco Hermanas, 2012). Her work appears in many journals and anthologies, including Poet Lore, Poetry Daily, The Florida Review, Spillway, Rock & Sling, Kestrel, and About Place. With the ensemble Cool Women she regularly performs poetry in the New York-Philadelphia metro area and occasionally on the west coast. With her husband and two cats, she lives in Easton, Pennsylvania, near the Delaware River. It is not far from where Lucy Bakewell – the subject of the Audubon’s Sparrow poetic biography – began her long-ago adventure with famed nature artist John James Audubon, who would become her husband.

​

Review


























A Review of Juditha Dowd's Audubon's Sparrow: A Biography-in-Poems
 

Exposition is an essential but elusive aspect of any narrative. With an epistolary work such as Audubon’s Sparrow, it can prove especially tricky. Writers frequently solve the problem with the insertion of imagined clippings from newspapers or other news reports. Since a journalist’s audience will require background information and context, its inclusion feels more natural than its placement in an exchange of personal letters or dairy entries. Recreated newspaper accounts can thereby supply an occasional omnipresent narrator to connect the dots.

Dowd eschews that approach, and the narrative of Lucy Bakewell’s life story is too obscure for most readers to rely upon for context. Instead, an elegant preface supplies a foundational framework. From then on, Dowd’s seventy-seven pieces – imagined letters, diary entries, some free verse poems, even a bill of sale – carry their own weight in moving the narrative forward. A Chronology as an appendix fills in additional sequencing. A few reproductions of Audubon’s lithographs are also appropriate additions.

Rose Metal Press, the respected small press responsible for Audubon’s Sparrow, claims as its tagline, “An independent publisher of hybrid genres.” Indeed, Audubon’s Sparrow qualifies as a hybrid. That said, however, Dowd is a poet. Even her non-poems seem like poems (much as Mary Karr’s memoirs read more like verse than prose). Still, it is fair to characterize Audubon’s Sparrow as a hybrid work. The imagined letters scan very much like bona fide 19th century personal correspondence. The poems read like poems.

The story begins with Lucy Bakewell’s introduction to John James Audubon (formerly Jean-Jacques Rabin) told initially through her diary entries. One entry reveals their growing affection as she adopts a pet name for him, La Forest. On the eve of Bakewell’s marriage to Audubon, her diary entry – titled “Tomorrow Morning” – captures the impatience and optimism of an eighteen-year-old. It reads:
   La Forest returned to us on Monday night

   along with his new partner Ferdinand Rozier –

   both cheerful and none the worse for wear.

   Louisville, they swear, has opportunity!
 

   We will wed in the parlor at half past ten.

   At last it is to be. 
By contrast, the pure poems function as interiorized thoughts never actually committed to paper. They are more dreamlike – less Victorian – and more beautiful.

Still other pieces combine the natural and poetic voices, as in “Henderson, Kentucky:” 
Less competition here

              more birds to draw.
 
This study cabin is out first real home

My husband writes in his journal
​
As better could not be had we were pleased.
A Notes section in the collection’s appendix confirms that although the italicized language quoted above sounds like that of a poet’s, it is in fact genuine historical text (minus a comma) extracted from the third volume of Audubon’s Ornithological Biography, or an Account of the Habits of the Birds of the United States of America (Adam & Charles Black, 1835) by the ornithologist himself.

Historical reconstructions of women and minorities who lived in a more bigoted age can create instabilities in the hands of 21st century authors. As a title, Audubon’s Sparrow suggests discomfort with the 19th century worldview of women; it hints at an irreverent, diminutive, and timid characterization of Bakewell even as it is adopted by the collection’s author. (The reference to Bakewell as a small bird has historical roots in that Audubon once directed an engraver to inscribe a swamp sparrow plate with his wife’s name for reasons now unknown.) Yet Bakewell was resourceful, spirited, and tall – very unlike a sparrow. Slaves are simply mentioned twice in the collection in a matter-of-fact way, without comment, which may also seem insensitive, but it keeps the voice authentically early 19th century white upper crust.

Although boasting aristocratic origins, both John Audubon and Lucy Bakewell were immigrants. Bakewell grew up in England and arrived with her well-to-do family at age fifteen. Audubon, born in Saint-Domingue (Haiti), was spirited out of France by a father of means with a forged passport so as to avoid conscription into Napoleon’s armies. The two married in Connecticut in 1808. They soon met with severe and incessant financial worries, with Bakewell supplying the laboring oar to keep their fragile household boat afloat.

Eventually, Audubon returned to Europe, attempting to market his naturalistic paintings and find an audience which evaded him in America. Bakewell remained behind. In the primary arc of Dowd’s collection, Bakewell struggles to support the family with private teaching contracts during Audubon’s multi-year absence. Their letters cross. Their marriage falters. His return becomes less and less certain, even as he makes good on his ambitions to build a fan base.

In “I Will Not Write Tonight,” Bakewell’s thoughts compose themselves into a complaint: 
let him swagger

let him have his bright success


 
and let it keep accounts for him
​
            and share his bed.
These poems bubble with imaginative empathy. They are truly engaging. They take wing. Dowd dignifies Bakewell without diminishing the mercurial genius of her husband or Bakewell’s affection for him. Dowd paints Bakewell as sympathetically bitter and – at the same time – essential, honest, and heroic.

John Audubon has been closely studied by biographers and rightly celebrated in poems, most notably in Robert Penn Warren’s book-length Audubon: A Vision (Random House, 1969). Attention to Lucy Bakewell has been more or less limited to a straightforward prose biography by Carolyn E. DeLatte, Lucy Audubon: A Biography (LSU Press, 2008) which focuses on Bakewell’s early life. Scrutiny of Bakewell by poets is long overdue. Dowd addresses that deficiency with a worthwhile, evocative, and finely wrought contribution.


Picture
Thomas E. Simmons is a professor of law at the University of South Dakota’s Knudson School of Law. He is a lifelong South Dakotan, an amateur historian, and a practicing lawyer. His scholarship addresses fiduciaries, inheritance, wealth, incapacity, and death. His first full length collection of poems, Tod Browning Loose-Leaf Encyclopedia, a poetic biography and series of film studies, was published in 2020 by Cyberwit. 

    Get updates from jet fuel review

Subscribe to Newsletter
© COPYRIGHT 2019. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
  • Home
  • About
    • Our Story
    • Masthead
  • Submit
    • Submission Guidelines
    • Submit Here
  • Features
  • Interviews
  • Book Reviews
  • Previous Issues
  • Blog
  • Contact
  • Issue #27 Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Art Spring 2024 >
      • Kristina Erny Spring 2024
      • Luiza Maia Spring 2024
      • Christy Lee Rogers Spring 2024
      • Erika Lynet Salvador Spring 2024
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2024
    • Issue #27 Poetry Spring 2024 >
      • Terry Belew Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Diamond Forde Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Dustin Brookshire​ & Caridad Moro-Gronlier Spring 2024 Spring 2024
      • Charlie Coleman Spring 2024
      • Isabelle Doyle Spring 2024
      • Reyzl Grace Spring 2024
      • Kelly Gray Spring 2024
      • Meredith Herndon Spring 2024
      • Mina Khan Spring 2024
      • Anoushka Kumar Spring 2024
      • Cate Latimer Spring 2024
      • BEE LB Spring 2024
      • Grace Marie Liu​ Spring 2024
      • Sarah Mills Spring 2024
      • Faisal Mohyuddin 2024
      • Marcus Myers Spring 2024
      • Mike Puican Spring 2024
      • Sarah Sorensen Spring 2024
      • Lynne Thompson Spring 2024
      • Natalie Tombasco Spring 2024
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2024
      • Donna Vorreyer Spring 2024
    • Fiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Bryan Betancur Spring 2024
      • Karen George Spring 2024
      • Raja'a Khalid Spring 2024
      • Riley Manning Spring 2024
      • Adina Polatsek Spring 2024
      • Beth Sherman Spring 2024
    • Nonfiction #27 Spring 2024 >
      • Liza Olson Spring 2024
  • Issue #28 Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Art Fall 2024 >
      • Eric Calloway Fall 2024
      • Matthew Fertel Fall 2024
      • JooLee Kang Fall 2024
      • Jian Kim Fall 2024
      • Robb Kunz Fall 2024
      • Sean Layh Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Poetry Fall 2024 >
      • Jodi Balas Fall 2024
      • Clayre Benzadón Fall 2024
      • Catherine Broadwall Fall 2024
      • Sara Burge Fall 2024
      • Judith Chalmer Fall 2024
      • Stephanie Choi Fall 2024
      • Sarah Jack Fall 2024
      • Jen Karetnick Fall 2024
      • Ae Hee Lee Fall 2024
      • Svetlana Litvinchuk Fall 2024
      • Mary Lou Buschi Fall 2024
      • Angie Macri Fall 2024
      • Gary McDowell Fall 2024
      • Sam Moe Fall 2024
      • Camille Newsom Fall 2024
      • Elizabeth O'Connell- Thompson Fall 2024
      • Olatunde Osinaike Fall 2024
      • Jessica Pierce Fall 2024
      • Diane Raptosh Fall 2024
      • Isaac Richards Fall 2024
      • Robyn Schelenz Fall 2024
      • Christopher Shipman Fall 2024
      • Alex Tretbar Fall 2024
      • Ruth Williams Fall 2024
      • Shannon K. Winston Fall 2024
      • Wendy Wisner Fall 2024
      • Anne Gerard Fall 2024
    • Issue #28 Fiction Fall 2024 >
      • J​oe Baumann Fall 2024
      • ​Morganne Howell Fall 2024
      • Matt Paczkowski Fall 2024
      • Ryan Peed Fall 2024
      • Gabriella Pitts Fall 2024
      • James Sullivan Fall 2024
  • Issue #29 Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Art Spring 2025 >
      • Irina Greciuhina Spring 2025
      • Jesse Howard Spring 2025
      • Paul Simmons Spring 2025
      • Marsha Solomon Spring 2025
      • Elzbieta Zdunek Spring 2025
      • Na Yoon Amelia Cha-Ryu Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Poetry Spring 2025 >
      • Deborah Bacharach Spring 2025
      • Diego Báez Spring 2025
      • Jaswinder Bolina Spring 2025
      • ​Ash Bowen Spring 2025
      • Christian J. Collier Spring 2025
      • ​Shou Jie Eng Spring 2025
      • Sara Fitzpatrick Spring 2025
      • Matthew Gilbert Spring 2025
      • Tammy C. Greenwood Spring 2025
      • Alejandra Hernández ​Spring 2025
      • Ben Kline ​Spring 2025
      • ​David Moolten Spring 2025
      • ​Tamer Mostafa Spring 2025
      • ​Rongfei Mu Spring 2025
      • Cynthia Neely Spring 2025
      • Pablo Otavalo Spring 2025
      • ​Bleah Patterson Spring 2025
      • ​M.A. Scott Spring 2025
      • ​Liam Strong ​ Spring 2025
      • Alexandra van de Kamp Spring 2025
      • ​Cassandra Whitaker Spring 2025
      • Angelique Zobitz Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Fiction Spring 2025 >
      • Vanessa Blakeslee Spring 2025
      • K. J. Coyle Spring 2025
      • Meredith MacLeod Davidson Spring 2025
      • Jessica Mosher Spring 2025
    • Issue #29 Nonfiction Spring 2025 >
      • JM Huscher Spring 2025
      • Qurrat ul Ain Raza Abbas Spring 2025