Ornithology
In this powerful second collection, award-winning South African poet Jeannie Wallace McKeown maps the landscape of loss with unflinching honesty and lyrical grace.
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Ornithology
The women in my family
return as birds
when they are done being women.
Grandmothers and great-grandmothers:
bokmakierie, wagtails, hoopoes.
(from the poem, Ornithology)
In this powerful second collection, award-winning South African poet Jeannie Wallace McKeown maps the landscape of loss with unflinching honesty and lyrical grace. Set against the backdrop of the Covid-19 pandemic, these poems navigate the intimate terrain of grief following the death of her parents, transforming everyday moments—from morning tea to grocery shopping—into profound meditations on love and survival. With clear-eyed precision and without descending into sentimentality, McKeown reminds us that in our shared vulnerability lies our deepest connection to life itself. These are poems that demand to be felt, understood, and returned to again and again.
Jeannie Wallace McKeown is a South African poet, writer and editor and has published widely in journals and anthologies. Her first collection, Fall Awake, was published in 2020 by Modjaji Books, and her upcoming collection, Ornithology, will be published in April 2024. She has twice been the winner of the University of Canberra Vice Chancellor’s International Poetry Prize, for ‘Climate Emergency’ in 2023, and for ‘Global South’ in 2024. In 2023, while taking a year off from PhD studies, she came second in an AVBOB Poetry Competition, the theme of which was Water is Life, with her poem ‘Water Crisis’. She lives in Makhanda with her family, both human and animal.
In Ornithology, Jeannie Wallace McKeown takes the reader into the heart of loss and grief, exploring the minutiae of everyday life afterwards – arranging cremations and birthdays, packing up clothes and buying groceries. In the Covid-19 pandemic, her tears salt her early morning tea; her dogs, trapped inside with her during lockdown, take their walks in their sleep while she grieves. Her writing is clear-eyed and direct, with no resort to sentimentality or cliche. The message is unmistakable: death and loss changes everything, but we are dying every day. There is only the urgent now in which to seek meaning and joy, to establish connections, to feel present and alive on the earth beneath your feet.
– Kerry Hammerton
“People often hide/their grief away,” says Jeannie Wallace McKeown in this deeply moving reflection on life, loss and meaning, before adding: “Not me./I wear my red eyes to the shops.” And so she does, making of profound grief at the loss of her much-loved parents a softly musical elegy to their lives. These beautifully spare and poignant poems display an unflinching honesty and a delight in living that ultimately celebrates rather than mourns. Ornithology is a collection that deserves to be read and re-read.
– Harry Owen
