‘Talking to the sky’

Crowd Source
by Cecily Nicholson

Vancouver: Talonbooks, 2025 
$19.95 / 9781772016581 

Reviewed by Heather Ramsay

*

Cecily Nicholson’s new book of poetry, Crowd Source, honours the nightly migration that thousands of crows make to a light industrial area on the western edge of Burnaby. For urbanites focused on their phones or traffic, this phenomenon could be easy to miss, but once you’ve noticed the spray of birds across the evening sky, you can’t help but want to know more. 

Nicholson’s book delivers. She begins her poetic reflections with a wide view from a mountain top. Her lens then sweeps across continents to grain fields near the Red Sea, and then to Arkansas. Geologic time mixes with seasonal shifts. UBC professor Nicholson (Harrowings) later zooms back in to a local baseball stadium, the poet’s apartment, city sidewalks (a side theme is the aggressive interactions between humans and crows, especially during fledgling season), and finally to the roost itself. 

Interspersed among these mostly unnamed poems about a species that many consider a pest, are on-campus antics in which two friends watch a crow “right a small container still full of dipping sauce”; the Vancouver Airport mishap when “Moira [the crow], perched on Raven Stealing the Beaver Lake cedar pole by Reg Davidson; and crows digging chafer beetles out of once nice lawns. Nicholson’s aphorism offers readers another way to consider the birds:

remember that being unwelcome

and hostile is not a crime

and is sometimes necessary

Black silhouettes fly through the text, demarcating thirteen numbered sections. With little or no punctuation or transitions, the poems sometimes flow between corvid and human experience, making the reader wonder if the narrator has taken on crow or human form:

reconnaissance on the grounds gathered
a wake for assessing danger

we joined the fray and found seats

taking in a great noise 
like nothing we had ever seen

honouring our loss

or

hollow bones are lighter, fly faster
             vocal bodies until we disperse
                            thinking like water

Sometimes the speaker is an observer: 

where bridge traffic slips 
over stagnant still water
where creek sides are thicketed you reach
for a red maple leaf
get stung about the ankles by nettle
a good stinging
sometimes it’s good to be stung
the pleasant numbing
joints after a long hot day

At other times, the speaker is an activist attempting to eradicate invasive species (the ever-present Himalayan blackberry and Himalayan balsam, which is also known as Policeman’s Helmet), or marching to honour Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls. 

Sometimes the plants come alive:

shadows deepen to conceal threats
the blackberries
                           will strangle you
should you weaken 
and fall asleep
in the vicinity

Nicholson’s lines often turn quickly as if she were fast cutting a film montage. In among these chaotic fractal moments, the reader discovers feeding techniques: dropping mollusc shells on hard surfaces to get at the meat or plucking at carrion on the highway. Or, crow lifecycles, such as moulting and the formation of wish bones. And, their grooming techniques—known as allopreening or combing through each other’s feathers. Nicholson also writes of several dozen forms of crow vocalizations, including litanies for their dead. 

At times, the writing moves from very concrete instructional passages to the beautiful, yet opaque:

heat distressed holds
onto low branch 
in a stupor

some blackening
medicine needs brewing

yellow leaves breezy
late afternoon sun dip
behind clouds.

Images and experiences are repeated, with highways, streams, flight paths, corridors, and commuters, circling back again and again until the poet finally plunges down the overgrown path to the roosting area near Still Creek:

one of the greatest spectacles
the city ever sees

twice daily most seasons
dawn to dusk in lotic spectacle

quantum listening 
with an innate sense of numbers

This reader found some of the pages difficult to unravel until this midpoint in the book. I strained through some of the fragmentary leaps until I could find the narrative once again. But once I’d finished the book and cycled back through again, I appreciated the abstractions much more.

Perhaps I began searching for patterns where they weren’t needed, especially when I noticed the roman numeral labelled sequence of short verses midway through the book and then went back to check if those numerals were connected in any thematic way to the similarly numbered sections. They were not. 

By the second to last section, the poet’s lens zooms out again, from the city streets and the urban roost, to the container port in the Fraser River delta. The reader sees the crows’ domain as they see it from the sky:

atop a wire, looking out to sea

north shore to the lower mainland

languid busy people landscapes to

swing by and wreck …

Then just before the end, another turn to a hovel the speaker once found, where she dreamed of living with birds. On the last page, Nicholson returns to stillness, the still brook surrounded by salmonberries where the crows gather.  

I think it is fair to mention the East Vancouver artist, June Hunter and her photos, calendars, prints and other products (not to mention her newsletters) as having increased the appreciation of crows in the city of Vancouver. In fact, Hunter recommends watching crows as a sort of therapy.

Nicholson, indeed, mentions Hunter as a source for further learning and inspiration, but the poet, known for her activism, community arts organizing and work in Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside, describes another origin story for the book—a workshop she took over a decade ago in which the writers were prompted to complete the phrase, “talking to the sky.”

Heather Ramsay lives and writes in unceded Ts’elxwéyeqw territory (otherwise known as Chilliwack, BC). Her debut novel, A Room in the Forest, was published by Caitlin Press in 2025. Her poems, non-fiction, and fiction have been published widely. She co-wrote two books for the Haida Gwaii Museum (Gina ‘Waadluxan Tluu: The Everything Canoe and gyaaGang.ngaay—The Monumental Poles of Skidegate) and a corporate history of her father’s suicide prevention training social enterprise (LivingWorks Legacy 30 Years). She has a Communications BA (SFU) and a Creative Writing MFA (UBC). [Editor’s note: This review is Heather’s first for BCR.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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