GOLDFINCHES

The Pulitzer Prize–winning poet’s tribute to the relationship between goldfinches and thistles finds new life in picture-book form.

In languorously unfolding phrases, Oliver, who died in 2019, notes that the birds wait all summer for the thistle flowers to disseminate their seeds. The finches then use the fluffy, silky pappus—which, attached to the seeds, helps them disperse in the wind—to line their nests, while the seeds themselves feed both parents and young. Sweet ingeniously nestles hand-lettered finch facts into spreads that teem with vibrant color charts keyed to the poem’s imagery. She depicts the poet as a young woman, wandering fields and woods, notebook at hand and trailed by a dog, as a diverse group of birdwatchers look on. Using vintage papers, old maps, and photographed objects including a nest, the artist subdivides her layered compositions into multiple rectangles, inviting close observation and delighted discovery, while reserving plenty of airy space for Oliver’s poem to shine. Sweet’s palette, rich in pinks and yellows, derives from the bright plumage of male goldfinches and the brilliance of flowering thistles, “each bud / a settlement of riches— / a coin of reddish fire.” Oliver concludes: “Is it necessary to say any more? / Have you heard them singing in the wind…? // Have you ever been so happy in your life?”

A superlative union of verse and visual art.