Sharon Perkins Ackerman’s most recent poetry collection— A Legacy of Birds (Kelsey Books 2025) — is comprehensive and lyrical, a wonderful representation of Appalachian childhood and growing pains. The poems each describe distinct memories, some hazy from humid days long gone, some sharp and clear as yesterday as Ackerman contemplates the past and the present. In some ways, this collection is reminiscent of a nature guide—a personal ode to the native fowl, flora, and fauna. Through these poems, Ackerman describes how her surroundings shaped her, and how they still capture her mind. The scenes she writes—of katydids “placed in a leaf, thin legs kicking at the moon,” of lonesome little white churches, of recipes handed down with old cast iron—are familiar to those from the rural South, evocative and rich to those foreign to it.
Within these words, Ackerman lays bare her heritage, with its legacy and its birds, and gives us precious glimpses of the life she lives now, one where she is still intertwined with nature, and one where she is now grappling with the comparison of age and youth, and the inevitable surrenders and gains that come with each new year. She writes of moving on and away from familiarity, of stepping away from memories but never letting them go:
“When I left your house,
mama, moving into
my own, loam rose
over my ankles, I clipped any tendril
that turned toward home.
Salt, I’d say,
remembering the lure
of looking back
the cankered love for what hurts.”
Ackerman is contemplative, constantly, thinking on her past and her present, her surroundings, her peoples’ surroundings. She pays attention to what is around her, identifying the nuthatch’s calls, the decomposition of a coyote, yet is deeply aware of what parts of her heritage she is also losing; the lost knowledge of the “forest’s foodways” that her mother knew better than her. While Ackerman cannot describe the sweetness of melon at two years old, she can intimately recall a dream of dying at fifteen, and at fifty, perhaps a feeling of emptiness. Ackerman meditates on everything, and the poetry comes off as such. Each line of each stanza reads as a carefully thought-out thought — not stream-of-consciousness as most think it is, but rather naturally reflective of what she is looking at:
“Nothing stays shattered;
damselflies, a rubyspot or rainbow —
chimera skating the shallows
of ancestral memory, clouds
of faces, now fat
now thin, floating virescent
out of touch. There are ways of being
in the water I’ve yet to know;”
In total, Ackerman’s collection A Legacy of Birds reads as an Appalachian Poetic Edda—a comprehensive detail of lives interconnected with nature as Ackerman looks back on her past and her heritage, while remaining utterly connected to her present and her environment in the now. This is perhaps best summarized in Ackerman’s own words in the final lines of the final poem:
“Older now, the heart reshuffles
in twilight, akilter in the boughs
our blackbird days
peering into a dark unknown
finding it iridescent.”
Sharon Perkins Ackerman
Sharon Perkins Ackerman holds an M.Ed from the University of Virginia. Her poems have appeared in the Atlanta Review, Southern Humanities Review, Appalachian Places, Still: The Journal, Meridian, Blue Mountain Review, Kestrel, and various others. She is the winner of the Hippocrates Poetry in Medicine international poetry contest, London 2019.
Very poignant review