Norfolk, Murder Mysteries, Birds, and Mimesis

I spent the weekend in Norfolk visiting an old friend. I’ve never been to that part of England before, and because I see the world through a fictional lens, Steve Burrows’ birder mysteries, set in the Norfolk town of Saltmarsh, shaped my expectations: wild seas, foggy marshes, a multitude of birds, and a dead body or two. Fortunately, I encountered no dead bodies, but all of the other elements were present in abundance.

I’ve moved on to London now, but during my customary first-day tour of all my favourite London bookshops, I picked up a copy of Burrows’ latest, A Cast of Falcons, unable to resist the striking UK cover design (always interesting to compare the covers of Canadian and UK editions). So my head is still a little bit in Norfolk.

And slipping out of big city bustle for a brief interlude, and once again seeing and hearing seabirds in action, had me appreciating even more deeply an extraordinary project I was introduced to at last week’s poetry symposium: Hanna Tuulikki’s Air falbh leis na h-eòin / Away with the Birds which explores the mimesis of birds in Gaelic song.

It began with Guth an Eòin | Voice of the Bird, a vocal composition in which Tuulikki weaves together fragments of traditional Gaelic poems and songs, and was then developed into an installation and performance on the Isle of Canna created by an interdisciplinary team that included musicians, writers, visual artists, ornithologists, and conservationists. I was fascinated by Tuulikki’s description of the process by which her composition and the installation were brought into being, and I found the extracts that she sang for us mesmerizing.

You can experience a bit of it for yourself, and you can learn more about the project here: http://www.awaywiththebirds.co.uk/about/