Distraction Display

Nicholas Friedman

Some birds, to fend
against predators,
will fake a battered
or broken wing
to redirect
attention from
their young. If this
is evolution’s
best guess, well,
it’s not a bad one.
Just yesterday,
I saw a grackle
dragging a wing
like out-of-water
tackle, then rise
from a tuft of clover,
tracking with ripe
chokecherry eyes
as it flew up
and over me.
It lit in a maple
by a nest I’d failed,
at first, to notice—
a minor thing
to thank distraction
for, when it
came into focus.

Feature Date

Series

Selected By

Share This Poem

Print This Poem

Nicholas Friedman’s first collection, Petty Theft, won the New Criterion Poetry Prize and will be published in fall 2018. Friedman is a Jones Lecturer in Poetry at Stanford University.

PN Review

May / June 2018

Manchester
England

General Editor
Michael Schmidt

Deputy Editor
Andrew Lattimer

Through all its twists and turns, responding to social, technological and cultural change, PN Review has stayed the course. While writers of moment, poets and critics, essayists and memoirists, and of course readers, keep finding their way to the glass house, and people keep throwing stones, it will have a place.

“It has […] attempted to take poetry out of the backwaters of intellectual life and to find in it again the crucial index of cultural health. In so doing it has often succeeded in broadening the horizons of our view of twentieth-century poetry and in encouraging poets to be ambitious about their concerns.”
—Cairns Craig, Times Literary Supplement

“…probably the most informative and entertaining poetry journal in the English-speaking world.”
—John Ashbery

“…the premier British poetry journal. Its coverage is broad and generous: from John Ashbery to new young English poets, from essays on Continental poetics and fiction to reviews of neglected poets both living and dead. At a time when poetry is largely neglected, [it] continues to make an eloquent case for its centrality to our culture.”
—Marjorie Perloff

Poetry Daily Depends on You

With your support, we make reading the best contemporary poetry a treasured daily experience. Consider a contribution today.