Cecily Nicholson, Crowd Source

 

those eyes
lined in laughter 

fawned
from the floor up 

understory
as the
            flies
I hike
carrying my body 

to elevation
to rest 

a col between
two sisters’
snowy peaks 

the alpine air
quality up close 

trace elements

ancient
volcanic vents

The fifth full-length poetry title by Vancouver poet Cecily Nicholson, following Triage (Vancouver BC: Talonbooks, 2011), From the Poplars (Talonbooks, 2014) [see my review of such here], Wayside Sang (Talonbooks, 2017) [seemy review of such here], which won the Governor General’s Award for Poetry, and HARROWINGS (Talonbooks, 2022) [see my review of such here], is Crowd Source (Talonbooks, 2025). According to the back cover, Crowd Source “parallels the daily migration of crows who, aside from fledgling season, journey across Metro Vancouver every day at dawn and dusk. Continuing Nicholson’s attention to contemporary climate crisis, social movements, and Black diasporic relations, this is a text for all concerned with practicing ecological futurities benefitting corvid sensibilities.” While fellow British Columbia poets such as Kim Trainor, through A blueprint for survival: poems (Toronto ON: Guernica Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here] and Matt Rader, through his FINE: Poems (Nightwood Editions, 2024) [see my review of such here], focus their conversation through the lyric around climate and wildfires, or Manitoulin Island poet sophie anne edwards, through Conversations with the Kagawong River (Talonbooks, 2024) [see my review of such here], focuses her climate conversation as a lyric study around a particular river, Nicholson focuses her own lyric conversation, her own particular study, through climate, colonialism and urban crows. “on the grounds / two of us stop to watch / a campus corvid of the oaks / right a small container still full / of dipping sauce,” she writes, as part of the book’s fifth section, “garbage, all of us / providing so much garbage // invisible until I am seen / in proximation [.]”

Held as a book-length suite in thirteen numbered lyric sections, Nicholson’s extended, expanded sequences are stitched through fragment and ongoingness, stretching a single line along a book-length thread. “to realize what’s common / pause for the count / and continuity / keep time,” begins the seventh section, “blackbirds are common / in the thousands / mythical / about this femme’s feet [.]” She speaks of crows and through crows, setting all else to a foundation of corvids across spaces occupied and altered by human activity. Nicholson’s lyrics, her small points and moments, accumulate across great distances, holding each moment in relation.

Late Pleistocene blackbird
families separated by glaciers
over fossil-rich chalk beds
prior to human settlement
Northwesterners 

in the Pacific Northwest
mainly kept to coastlines
beaches and seafood
in particular whelks 

back then blackbirds
fashioning beads
onyx of perceptive eyes
abalone primer in feathers
early years alert to arrivals

Detailed and delicate, there is something of the lyric study approach in Nicholson’s Crowd Source comparable to American poet Lorine Niedecker’s own approach through Lake Superior (Seattle WA/New York NY: Wave Books, 2013) [see my review of such here]. As such, Crowd Source exists as a book-length poem fueled by research, observation and study, but propelled by language. “I am traffic, always looking to the sky,” Nicholson writes, as part of the sixth section, “braced for / aggression [.]” Or, two pages further, as she offers:

the nature of sources is to attribute citation
sources may form or signify communities
wooded area intermittent creek industrial
high-tech office park poles used for perching
trees: cottonwood, alter, yew, cedar, fir
in a riparian channel harbouring a deep V
inward, to the earth, through to old aquifers

first the waiting-for-kids-to-be-born season
fledglings fight to make flight in the blue
whole as families unlike our voided families
return each night to gather in conference
learning the lay of the land likely close to
four or five before establishing or inheriting
relations in firm but opaque commitments

Nicholson articulates relation and interrelation, offering the myriad ways in which elements of the world connect together, held in place, at least here, in language, from climate, capitalism and human occupation, all seen through the wisdom of crows. “one of the greatest spectacles / the city ever sees,” she writes, to open the ninth section, “twice daily most seasons / dawn to dusk in lotic spectacle // quantum listening / with an innate sense of numbers // contours sensing a line / between the earth’s magnetic field // synthesized de novo surviving / billions of years as memories / stored in cells [.]” She writes blackbirds and grackles, crows and Vancouver’s SkyTrain, weaving quoted language into such meditative lengths as a kind of day book, riffing off moments and sources, crow activity and colonial impact. Or, as she writes to open the self-contained poem “The Still,” set at the end of the tenth section:

descends into the heart
of its colonial name 

night grows dark as it does
and they are 

finally, the same colour
as the sky 

slightly orange

glinting, even asleep
they are 

wind chimes
and weather vanes