In There Are Birds, John Taggart explores the meaning of being singular though a range of American precursors: poets such as Marianne Moore and Louis Zukofsky, "nature boys" John and William Bartram, musicians, photographers, and private detectives. As Nathaniel Mackey writes, "Beautifully, indelibly, There Are Birds advances a notational method and measure all its own-part flight, part aesthetic tractatus, part lab report. More compunction than consolation but a long sorrow song as well, it plies a bracing, severe tonic both iterative and terse, a work of uncanny stretch and compression."