In The Unexpected Aviary, there are birds enclosed in a self-referential world, like a cage. Though the elements of that aviary seem fixed at first, mundane even, its dimensions shift, the scale changes, the perspective alters profoundly by means of the subtle repetitions and slight mutations that link the poems within themselves and throughout the collection. Ultimately, one learns, all one can count on is that words are what shape and contain reality, words are the aviary.
          The whole book can be seen to trace the event of and recovery from the suicide of a friend, possibly a lover, possibly an alter ego. The woman who has died is directly mentioned only twice, but images of descent, death, stillness and emptiness as well as ascent, awakening, fluttering and the possibilities of embodiment are encountered in an astonishing array in the poems.
          The long poem "Sightings," early in the book, one of several deceptively literal but deeply crafted pieces, addresses the shifting terrain of what "we can count on." In the course of the ten sections of the poem, words, which seemed literal, take wing, and we begin to learn how these poems are to be read, by resonance. Echoes, or as the title of the poem would have it, "sightings" give body and meaning to what at first might seem randomly dropped into the poem, The first section begins:

Crows skim over a page of snow
behind the house
as if one sentence were enough.

While we are still grappling with how a flight of birds suggests that one sentence might be enough, in the second section we read that

Nailed over the bed
of my earliest childhood friend,

the cross was a sparrow
with stiff wings

The crow and the sparrow seem too bluntly just birds, added, arbitrarily. In the next section, there’s "a starling trapped inside one room." By then we expect birds to inhabit each stanza. Sure enough, a "heron camouflaged," "a beady-eyed titmouse," a seemingly random assortment, arrive. Is this the aviary, we wonder, a list of omnipresent New England birds? And what is unexpected about that?
          "Our world’s total avian population/was last reckoned at about 100 billion–:" section eight announces. Suddenly, we understand that "everything counts," and is counted. The bird in each stanza has been counting for something all along; there have been words referring to numbers and to be drawn into account. We are thrown back to the first stanza’s apparently banal reference to "one sentence" in the line, "as if one sentence were enough." Oh, it is not at all banal. The notion of counting has quietly pivoted from casual enumeration to profound significance. The notion has evolved that in spite of death, for instance, each sighting, counts. This calm little poem that seemed to flit from one bird-related scene to the next has gathered weight so gracefully, that by the time we come to the last stanza, each of its words has resonances throughout the poem.

How I woke with the word
ceaseless in my mouth.

Ceaseless, ceaseless,
ceaseless–

like a bird dealt one phrase
among all others for a lifetime,
Then counting on it.

The one word here, "ceaseless," is life’s birdcall. Life continues, ceaselessly, and says so. What one can count on is the word, and what the word says. Beating through all the sightings is "that heartbeat/ wrapped in my hands." There is deep continuity under the apparently disconnected.
          Additionally, what L.R. Berger manages to do in this book is simultaneously to retain the clarity of the literal image and to diffuse its boundaries with dream-like associations. Sometimes, this does not work well. In "Wallpaper" after a series of brilliant dissolves about the various layers of wallpaper in a neighbor’s house

...As if something new were being risked
but only one small risk at a time. Or some mistake made,
you swore you wouldn’t make again, that’s made again
slightly embellished the next time, or muted–

roses climbing a fence, followed by roses climbing a trellis,
followed by roses in free fall.

The wonderful reality of someone’s fixation with rose wallpaper over and over again, slightly different, never right, is then forced, by way of the association of pattern to women in a nursing home wearing dresses like wallpaper–

I could walk down that corridor pitching goodnights
like bridal bouquets, or, roses,–Goodnight Dolores

L.R. Berger’s unusual strength is her ability to connect more obliquely than this too conventional movie dissolve, from the rose patterned paper to the floral patterns of the old women’s housecoats. In this first book of poetry the magic is in seeming disconnected, in seeming to be reporting without comment, and in fact to be setting every thing into a vast context.
          "Window of Sixteen Panes," a poem in the third section, in which the speaker is grappling most intently with perspective, literally and figuratively, is a masterpiece of what Berger is up to. The various elements, the numbered panes of glass, the four objects: a red fox, a painter, the fields and the speaker, are shown in various lights. The poem is like a series of paintings with each element moved according to an intricate almost mathematical formula for its placement in each stanza. However, when you read the poem, it seems linear, like a narrative. Only later do you realize that the whole poem involves a single scene, a single location with the four elements in different configurations. This is the opposite premise from that of "Sightings" in which variety is shown to be reducible. Here limitation is experienced as vast. By the end, suddenly, we take a new perspective; we can be outside the windowpanes.

           ...The red fox sees
what must be the chamber
where day is held confined

until morning:

With this shift we not only move outside the sixteen panes from inside of which we have been peering, but we move into the mind of fox, in which artificial light is perceived as the trapped sunshine of day. Here is an example of Berger’s quiet ability to perceive without preconception. Then she goes farther:

          ...The red fox
and the painter and I and the fields
sprawl in the dark beyond
the cloister of the body–

beneath that boundless rim
we’ve named sky to contain us.

Now we see the mind that calls the collection an Unexpected Aviary. The very sky is just a word, a name. The naming of it is what "contain(s)" us. The cage is huge. And it is not restrictive but artistic, a shape to make meaning.
          What is truly unexpected about this aviary of poems is the quiet enormity of the space, the understated moments of grace suggested by the subtle repetitions and slight mutations that link the poems within themselves and throughout the collection