wyrd] birdIn times fraught with ecological and individual loss, Claire Marie Stanceks wyrd] bird grapples with both the necessity and apparent impossibility of affirming mystical experience. It is at once a book length lyric essay on the 12th century German mystic Hildegard of Bingen, a dream journal, a fragmentary notebook, a collection of poems, and a scrapbook of photographic ephemera. Stancek follows Hildegard as she guides the poet through an underworld of