Book Review

When my kids were young, one of my favorite board books to read to them was Martin Wadell’s Owl Babies, the story of a mother owl who leaves her owlets in search of food. The baby owls fret and worry, wondering if their mother will ever come back, imagining her lost to a fox or the night woods. Of course, the mother returns, asking, “What’s all the fuss. You knew I’d come back.” And all is restored in the hollow of the tree. It was a message I wanted my children to believe—that mothers always return—even as I fully understood that happy endings were as fragile as the ivy branch upon which, Bill, the youngest owlet sat.

Hope. Without it, we, as humans, cannot make it through our days. And hope is what we find in Polly Atkin’s Company of Owls, a beautiful collection of short essays that carry us forward on the slender hope that with each successive essay the owls that keep Atkin company in Grasmere will remain, will thrive, will show us how to be resilient and strong even when, say, a global pandemic demands isolation or a body can no longer do what it has always done. Every appearance of Atkin’s owls must be earned by the reader. We must be patient in the woods of her lines. And when an owl arrives, it reveals our desire for continuance. We feel relief as much as joy.

As someone who has spent the past two years researching owls, I was so grateful to be gifted Atkin’s book. While it absolutely concerns owls—their habits and habitats, their abilities and preferences—the book is ultimately about love, love of the non-human, love of solitude, love of stillness, love of the natural world. Atkin is a poet, and you experience her deft compression with every sentence, every image (“The light is lilac now, tangible”). Her lines are spare, and her essays are quiet in the most healing of ways. She wants her readers to love the owls as she loves them, and she takes the reader in hand from page one. She tells us, “Don’t go with so much grasping in your heart and you may be lucky. Let go of your longing and you might be lucky. Look away from your want and an owl might rise out of the earth as though it just entered this realm.” This is less a book about owls and more a book about a human coming to know their own limits and desires by watching tiny witches in the woods.

The essays in Company of Owls are intimate. We walk with Atkin through the grasslands, we tarry at her favorite oak, and we, too, strain our eyes in hopes we see an owl. Where Atkin looks, we look. When Atkin rests, we rest. On the days she cannot leave her house because of work or illness, we go without owls that day as well.

Atkin struggles with an “energy-limiting illness” that makes the company of humans hard. While she loves to be with friends, they exhaust her. The energy she expends in social situations is “a frenetic, borrowed energy—borrowed from [her] future self.” Her chronic illness limits her “earthbound body” and some days it limits her ability to walk, but it also has given her the kind of deep patience, stillness, and belief in abiding that owling requires. At times, Atkin is more owl than human.  She prefers the quiet, prefers the night, prefers the company of trees. Owls present a kind of paradox. They are one of the most recognizable birds: Almost any child can draw an owl. Yet, they are some of the least known, least studied, least seen. In some ways, it is her physical limitations that open her to the kind of patience owl watching requires. Owls are good at hiding. And Atkin is a student of long nights.

Atkin’s essays move more or less chronologically from the pandemic to the years just after. With the seasons, Atkins sits with the tawny owls near her home. She watches owlets branch and disperse; she buries their dead and learns what she can even though she is hardly allowed more than a glimpse. Toward the middle of the book, she recognizes that the owlets who are on the ground learning how to grow into their owl wings are just fine. They need nothing. Instead, she writes, “It is me who needed her.”

Atkin’s book is one that remains with the reader. It is the kind of book that causes you to look at the world differently and to welcome the unknown. Toward the end, Atkin writes, “There is so much pain in this world, so much loss and destruction. So little to be certain of. So little to kindle hope. But in the woods an owlet is calling determinedly.” Hope found in the call of a bird you may not ever see. Such a gift.