A Poet and Her Owls: A Book Review of Blue Between Owls by Daye Philippo

By Heather Cadenhead

When I opened the package containing Daye Phillippo’s poetry collection, Blue Between Owls: Blue Chore Coat and Other Collected Poems (Codhill Press, 2026), I was delighted to find a perturbed owl, courtesy of cover artist Elizabeth Cline, practically glaring back at me—silent but self-assured in a sea of milky blue. I became better acquainted with that owl—and the other animals and humans that feature in the poet’s life—as I moved through the collection, a follow-up to Phillippo’s Thunderhead (Slant Books, 2020) and winner of the 2024 Codhill Press Pauline Uchmanowicz Poetry Award.

In “Owl Hunger” (p. 37), for example, I learned that Phillippo’s owl “find[s] the dark shape” of a barn cat each night and “walk[s] with him up the hill to the house.” Phillippo explains: “Sometimes, you just need someone to walk with you, tell you you’re worth walking out into the dark for, tell you what you’ve done right, for once.” After our children went to bed, I led my husband out to the front porch to read “Owl Hunger” out loud to him—in the middle of January. My teeth chattered as I read: “Sometimes, you just need to walk into the dining room, turn on that little lamp and let it fill you with light.” As I read, I was grateful for the lamplight that warmed my own windows.

Besides barn cats and owls, the poet watches toads. In “Picking Green Beans” (p. 42), she asks forgiveness of a “little brown toad ... for disrupting whatever toads do” as she harvests garden beans. Elsewhere, we learn of “Barred Rock chicks” (“Flock,” p. 13) that “stand skirt to skirt at the open door of the coop.” For Phillippo, this formation brings to mind the women who lined up Saturdays at the fabric store, “wait[ing] for the manager / to key the lock, so [they] could flock down / the creaking wooden steps to the basement sale.” In animals, the poet names loneliness, fear, and elation. This is, indeed, a collection attentive to “all creatures great and small,” à la Cecil Frances Alexander’s hymn.

Blue Between Owls, however, does not only concern itself with animals. The human condition is also accounted for—we glimpse the poet’s father in “Coffee Cup” (p. 16), his back at first turned to us. We see, instead, the coffee cup in his hands: “three grouse / paused in various stages of flight” and, after years of daily use, “the gold trim … worn away.” Her father “look[s] up, eyes, smiling, ‘Sis’” and “the mug,” the poet tells us, is “saying this to [her], still.” I didn’t know the poet’s father. And, somehow, after reading “Coffee Cup,” I am grieving alongside the poet. Somehow, at the end of this eleven-line poem, I am missing her father, too.

In “Requiem” (p. 12), Phillippo writes of yet more owls—“a Great Horned Owl” this time, perhaps “made of aged maple / and melancholy,” just as the day itself may as well be made of maple and melancholy, because “today is [the] birthday” of a “young friend / who passed in ICU last Saturday.” Thinking of her friend, the poet “listen[s] / to the owl’s lament … the silences between.” In this poem, more than any other, I find the “blue between owls.” While Phillippo thinks of her friend, I think of my grandmother, who collected owls: owl-printed hand towels, owl-shaped drink coasters, ceramic owls, crochet owls, and so many others. Nicknamed “Hooty,” my grandmother would’ve eaten this poetry collection up. Perhaps that was why I was drawn to this book in the first place.

In “Aperture” (p. 61), Phillippo names a great chasm of space and silence—a space once occupied by her father and other departed loved ones. She dialogues with that chasm as she faces a “ragged grass, trees and sky.” She is under the same sky her father knew, back when he was infinite. Death has touched this poet, more than once, and that fact is the catalyst for a clear-eyed embrace of her own mortality.

Aperture

Daye Phillippo

In the morning, when I slide open

the heavy old barn door on its track

and step inside, pull the cord

to let the chickens out, then turn

again toward that open door,

tall rectangle of light

and ragged grass, trees and sky,

the face of the other old barn

at the right, its hand-hewn rafters

where barn swallows nest,

fly in and out

through gaps made

by neglect and the passage

of time, the way the body

falls into disrepair,

I wonder if stepping

from this life

into the next will be like

stepping through

an aperture like this

and I hope it's true, ordinary

morning like this.

Some twenty pages later, Phillippo offers a postscript to “Aperture” in “Questions for a Shard of Whiteware” (p. 80): We are all “temporary residents / … truth be told.” This poem is also in conversation with “Coffee Cup” as the poet asks a shard of dinnerware: “[W]hat tales could you tell if you could speak?” We remember the mug that still talks to Phillippo, so many years later. We exist in a world of storied things, the poet seems to tell us. What speaks to whom, of course, is a different matter.

Does the origin of a thing—whether it is God-made or man-made—affect its valuation? Most of us probably see the value in a clutch of roadside daffodils. A shard of broken dinnerware may require some translation. In that shard of whiteware, Phillippo finds an artifact from an unstudied culture: “[W]ho plied you, knife and fork? What plans and dreams / did you overhear?” Broken now, the shard “keep[s] their secrets, still.” Uneasy, perhaps, that every meal eaten on this whiteware is now lost to time, Phillippo goes about the business of recording her own history.

As she documents that history, she names a desire for what is infinite and unchanging. She wonders, for example, if her departed father “still kiss[es] Mother” in “Blue Jay Refrain in the Keys of D-Flat Major & E” (pp. 21-22). Is her father “in a wildwood breathing deeply, all that good oxygen from the trees?” Does he still “smell of Old Spice” and “cheer on the Cubs”? I turn the page—now, we get to the heart of the matter: “Does anything there remind you of me?” I recall, here, the day we took down the crochet owl that hung over the machines in my grandmother’s laundry room. For decades, its black eyes peered back at me through darkness. Then, it was gone. I’m not sure if anyone got it in the end—a child, a grandchild. Perhaps it made its way to a Goodwill. I don’t remember. I only know that when Phillippo asks her final question—“When I see you, will you / cup my face?”—I am asking it, too.

---

Luci Shaw once wrote that she liked the way Heather Cadenhead saw things—“not just with her eyes, but with all her senses focused.” A native Tennessean, Heather’s poems and essays are published or forthcoming in Inkwell, The Rabbit Room, St. Katherine Review, and other journals. She publishes a monthly Substack newsletter on caregiving and creativity called Firelight. Her poetry has received Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net nominations as well as a New Plains Review Editorial Prize.

Find more articles, poetry, and music on The Rabbit Room Substack!

Find us on Substack