Tree Fall with Birdsong

We believe a tree must live forever.
It has been there all of our lives…

“The Big Maple”

Tree Fall with Birdsong explores the natural world around the poet’s home in Mississippi and delves into memories of the rural landscapes of Iowa where he was raised, Flanders, and other places he has traveled. These poems look to the natural life cycle as a corollary of loss and renewal, both in response to illness and death of family and friends and to the collective sense of grief in the wake of the recent pandemic. Mortality, seen in “Tree Fall” with the loss of steadfast and familiar trees, is complemented by the creative force of “Birdsong.” The poems retell myths of the underworld, and connect to the lore of wildflowers, snakes, birds, and trees.

Praise for Tree Fall with Birdsong

Loblolly Press Southern Summer Reads Pick for 2025

 Hauntingly personal yet welcoming lyrics, painstakingly crafted in
delightful, accessible language.

Claude Wilkinson
author of World Without End

Kendall Dunkelberg’s fourth collection of poetry, Tree Fall with Birdsong (Fernwood Press 2025) demonstrates how the same senses we use to understand the exterior world can help us map our interior self as well. The speaker notes in the poem “Passion Flower,” “No, this is not a crucifix / but a whorl of purple fragrance,” and we are reminded not to mistake what the world is for what it looks like. Like the title suggests, Tree Fall with Birdsong is full of the music of the natural world but the birds and trees are not ornament – they’re integral to how the poems think and feel…

C. T. Salazar in Southern Review of Books

In “Tree Fall with Birdsong,” Kendall Dunkelberg’s fourth poetry collection, we are continually witnessing the melody of the natural world. From warblers to crows to the lakes and swamps of Mississippi and the orchards of his family in Iowa, we glimpse into the beauty, pain, and sometimes isolation of the human spirit as a spectator of nature.

Celeste Maria Schueler for the Clarion Ledger & Mississippi Books Page

The keenly attentive poems of Dunkelberg’s Tree Fall with Birdsong reveal his long immersion in the losses and continuities of the natural world and the ways in which the other-than-human can instruct us in the pleasure and pain of being human.

Ann Fisher-Wirth
coeditor of Attached to the Living World: A New Ecopoetry Anthology
and author of Paradise Is Jagged

Tree Fall with Birdsong is a sharp-eyed meditation on the natural world and the nature of being human. With extraordinary insight, Dunkelberg considers again and again an essential question: “What is mortality in the face of this life”

Jacqueline Allen Trimble
author of How to Survive the Apocalypse

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