Marianne Boruch: Decoys (July 1995)

Marianne Boruch draws on her experiences working at an albatross sanctuary in Hawaii to explore the idea of poems as decoys: like decoy albatross that freeze and exaggerate the features of the bird, drawing the real birds to safe nesting sites, poems can similarly use “decoys,” or imaginative, metaphorical means–suggestive images that protect by indirection what they call forth. Boruch explores both the pitfalls and powers of poetic decoys as she examines poems by Whitman, Eavan Boland, and Randall Jarrell.