Book Review 2017-013
Vagrants & Uncommon Visitors by A. Kendra Greene
2017 by Anomalous Press, 30 pages
(I ordered this one early enough to receive one of the limited edition letter press cover copies)
Having thoroughly enjoyed the first two chapbooks A. Kendra Greene had published about icelandic museums, I was on high alert for the third in the series. Vagrants & Uncommon Visitors did not let me down even a little bit.
The same wit and excitement can be found in Greene's writing this time around that were present in Greene's first two books. Those, a look at a phallological museum, and a museum of stones, were presented in a similar fashion to this third volume: Greene takes a look at the history of the individual(s) responsible for the museum, and specifically looks at what led them to their interest in the topic, and then looks at the current museum itself, while taking a longer view toward museums and collecting things in general.
Vagrants is a term used when discussing birds in Iceland--one of five levels of expectant levels of seeing the particular bird type. The first four levels are: common, less common, uncommon, and rare and per Greene these "have to do with certainly, with whether you can absolutely depend on seeing a bird in suitable habitat in proper season," where a vagrant "are out of their normal range; vagrants have appeared somewhere new."
Not all of the birds in the Sigurgeir's Bird Museum are vagrants, in fact there are examples of every modern Icelandic bird except for one. But it does have its vagrants and its uncommon visitors as well. The one modern it does not have is the Red Phalarope, a bird that Greene describes "it used to be they were come all at once, in one flock, birds that would blot out the sun." She adds on a few lines later "Perhaps Sigurgeir's grandmother knew these days without having to be told." This is something Greene does that I love--she brings things full circle, even things one might not expect. This note was on page 24 out of 30. The book opens with: "Their grandmother was blind. She hadn't always been, but as the glaucoma took her sight, she would ask, each day,what birds were on the water." In a nice nod to Sigurgeir's grandmother, the being told about the Phalarope's blotting out the sun Greene brings her, and her own interest in the birds on the lake the family lived on, back to the reader.
Greene tells us more about Sigurgeir and how a neighbor's finding a Grey Heron dead at the lake led to his collecting. For whatever reason, when shown the bird that the neighbor had frozen, Sigurgeir took it and had a taxidermist take care of it. When he picked up his newly stuffed bird he decided to purchase two others that were on hand in the store. As Greene notes, the town around Lake Myvatn was about 400 people, a number "too small for secrets." When word got out that Sigurgeir had an interest in dead birds, he began to get calls. And collect Sigurgeir did.
However, even though Sigurgeir did the collecting, and the museum is named after him, he had nothing to do with the museum itself, which is a major difference between the first two museums Greene wrote about and this one. An accident on the lake that led to his death is what brought about the museum. His family struggled for nearly a decade after his death to put together everything that turned his collection into a museum, one run by his youngest sister, the youngest of seven siblings and the one that still runs the family farm with her mother. Stefania is her name and after milking the farm's cows every morning, she opens up the museum 360 days a year. Between 10 and 20,000 people come through annually.
While Greene does a fabulous job at describing the museum itself and its roots and the history of the individual and family that put it together and run it, something she's done throughout this series is to consider museums, and collecting, in general. Specifically in this particular chapbook she writes:
But what Sigurgeir did was a different kind of making. It was not his hand that mattered, but his eye. And surely every museum is a museum of selection, a museum of choices made, but here the how of collecting seems not to matter. The source of a thing does not matter. it is the thing that matters in its own right. And that shouldn't shock me, surely it shouldn't, but when was collecting ever just about things?
It's a continuation from an earlier book where she wondered about the randomness of how a collection might go from just that, a collection, into becoming a museum where others become involved, sometimes just in the visiting and enjoyment of one's collection, and other times in the running and operations as well. I don't know how many museums there are in Iceland, but I hope there are many, many more and that Greene continues to find herself with questions about their origins, their impact, and just what they accomplish so that she continues to publish more of these chapbooks, or maybe even something larger.
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