[V]ermont poet and playwright David Budbill had been diagnosed with a rare brain disorder when he spoke last spring about a novel he was writing titled “Broken Wing.”
“It’s the story of a bird with a broken wing who can’t fly south for the winter,” he said in an interview posted on his website, “and has to spend the winter in the north where it can’t survive.”
A friend then asked: Is the book autobiographical? Did the author view himself as a bird with a broken wing?
“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that,” Budbill replied. “It never occurred to me until this minute.”
That’s because Budbill had other things in mind when he began the novel, which the Brattleboro-based Green Writers Press is publishing three months after his death this fall at age 76.
Publisher Dede Cummings says the Northeast Kingdom writer first told her about the book pre-diagnosis almost two years ago.
“Out of the blue he called up and said, ‘I want you to publish my novel,’” she recalls.
Cummings went on to read the allegorical tale about an injured rusty blackbird that Budbill not only befriended in real life but also captured in a photo seen on the book’s cover.
In the novel, a character named The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains discovers the bird outside his hilltop home in autumn and follows its evolution through the seasons.
“The Man watched Broken Wing more and more intently,” Budbill writes, “and, as is always the case, the more closely you watch, the more you see, and the more you see, the more you begin to understand, and the more you understand, the deeper and stronger your feelings become for that which you are watching and seeing and coming to understand.”
What follows is part folktale, part field notes of the beauty and brutality of nature, part review of the author’s longtime interest in ancient Chinese poetry and part reflection on what it might be like to be a person of color in one of the nation’s whitest states.
“Maybe it’s his struggle to hang on,” Budbill writes, “that has made me more aware than I usually am of how hard it is for some creatures to survive, especially creatures like Broken Wing who have so many strikes against them from the start: stranded in a strange and hostile season, put upon by predators, crippled almost to death. What more can happen to him while he still survives?”
Budbill saw the book’s cover, inside illustrations and design before he died Sept. 25 of progressive supranuclear palsy, spurring The New York Times to trumpet him as “a local oracle, a beloved voice … whose pared-down, plain-dress poems about his remote corner of northern Vermont found a national audience thanks to Garrison Keillor,” host of public radio’s “The Writer’s Almanac.”
The 216-page paperback is one of several Budbill works to be published posthumously. Copper Canyon Press will release his final poetry collection, “Tumbling Toward the End,” early next year, while Cummings is working with the author’s family on two children’s book manuscripts.
“He knew ‘Broken Wing’ was going to do well — presales are strong,” the Green Writers Press head says, “so that made him really happy.”
That’s the same feeling The Man Who Lives Alone in the Mountains, facing death, experiences at the end of the novel.
“He thought about all the other lives, both human and non-human, that come and go, come and go, come and go, here in this tiny little place, this slab of mountainside where he lived,” Budbill writes, “and he smiled to himself, and knew he was a lucky so-and-so to be here and feeling so sad and blue, because he knew it was a sign that he was alive and still in love, with this life, and his life, and this world, and all the creatures therein.”