The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year

Margaret Renkl’s The Comfort of Crows is a vivid and deeply personal meditation on how humans have obfuscated the beauty of the natural world, particularly as it exists on the margins of human habitation. Writing from her suburban Nashville home, Renkl cultivates a perspective that transforms ordinary spaces like lawns, roadside ditches, and fence lines into sites of ecological richness and poetic revelation. Rather than romanticizing distant wilderness, she turns her attention to what grows and crawls and flutters just beyond her kitchen window.

Her writing bears witness to a biodiversity that suburban life often dismisses or doesn’t see. She describes how “hardly a window in this house […] doesn’t look out onto a feeder or birdbath” (15-16), illustrating how her own suburban home is a portal through which she observes the beauty of the natural world. Later, she describes how she stands “at the window every chance [she gets]” (214), highlighting how attention can reveal abundance where others see only neglect. Renkl’s gift lies in close observance, a willingness to honor the vibrant world in a place where human infrastructure increasingly encroaches on the natural world. In bearing witness to the vitality of nature at this intimate scale, she invites others to develop their own sense of reverence for it.