Loon Lore

In one of Bill Sullivan’s poems, embraced as are all the verses in Loon Lore by the author’s complementary essays and by Leslie Tryon’s inspired illustrations, the speaker recalls Henry David Thoreau’s attempt to look into ‘the fiery red eyes’ of a loon to discover what birds and humans have in common. The loon, recognizing the transcendentalist’s pathetic fallacy for what it was, outsmarted Thoreau. In contrast, Sullivan is sly enough to reveal the loon’s correspondences with the rest of us and with the earth we share, not by holding the animal in the palm of his hand, but by liberating it to fly across the pages of this singularly beautiful book.

The old music of the loon is the story of the world inside the world, a story of muskeag tamarack, spruce taiga, dandle of moonlight, something haunting beyond our understanding. Bill Sullivan captures the loon’s essential mystery in this brilliant mix of poems, stories, essays, legends, and sometimes unsettling facts – all enriched by great drawings, all awakening the memory of something fading to a silence made clear with the telling.

In eloquent essays and exquisite verse, Bill Sullivan paints a kaleidoscopic portrait of the loon, a bird of vivid colors, a haunting call, and primeval mystery. Beautifully illustrated by Leslie Tryon, Loon Lore is a rousing call to action to protect this familiar winter visitor to the South County shoreline.