Like Jenna Butler’s Revery: A Year of Bees, I’m teaching Kit Dobson’s Field Notes on Listening this summer, and rereading it in preparation for last week’s classes was a revelation: I had forgotten it was so good. The book is structured like a musical composition, with three movements bracketed by a prelude and a coda, . The prelude and coda present a sonic history, in 100 fragments, of the first months 2020, when Dobson was working on this book. Those sounds are arranged chronologically, so that the prelude ends with the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, and the coda explores the sounds and, more importantly, the silences of that experience.

Where the prelude and coda present sounds in an impressionistic way, the book’s three movements constitute a long braided essay that considers the links between listening and the land. Field Notes on Listening, Dobson writes in what constitutes the book’s thesis statement, argues “that listening, or a lack thereof, has become a social and environmental problem,” and that “listening to landscapes, and doing so with dedication over a long period of time, is one path through this thicket.” Such listening is deeply political, “an act of defiance,” since “[w]hat remains unheard remains unacknowledged.” For Dobson, learning to listen has been energizing; it has allowed him to make connections and identify patterns.

The process of learning to listen to the land, Dobson argues, is open-ended and unfinished, but the twin themes he identifies at the outset, listening and land, pull the deliberately fragmentary text together. In fact, the sounds presented in the prelude and coda, which convey the effects of climate change, genocide, populism, and human separation and community, are amplified in those three movements. Sometimes, as with “the grinding of celestial music just past the bounds of hearing” in the night sky, those sounds are metaphorical; mostly, though, they are literal. They include the music he loves (the Beatles, Jeremy Dutcher, Leonard Cohen, Glenn Gould’s version of Bach’s Goldberg Variations), weather forecasts celebrating unusually warm winter temperatures, the sounds of family stories, the muffling silence of fresh snow, the crunch and rumble of equipment at a landfill, the cheers of protestors greeting Greta Thunberg outside Alberta’s Legislature, the “glomp glomp glomp” of tires rumbling over knots in the wooden deck of the bridge across the Athabasca River in his parents’ home town, the sounds recorded in his grandmother’s master’s thesis. Listening to all of these sounds, cataloguing them, becomes analagous to reading, to bearing witness to the world, to communicating. 

It’s worth mentioning the quality of Dobson’s writing. In her review of Field Notes on Listening, Calgary poet Micheline Maylor notes that while Dobson isn’t himself a poet, his prose has a “lyrical and poetic heft.” Another reviewer, Bill Arnott, argues that Dobson’s “passion for poetry comes through in this writer’s elegant, metered prose.” They are both absolutely right: the writing in this book is beautiful, its language sonorous and vivid. Dobson’s careful, lyrical prose brings the sounds he hears, and the arguments he makes, alive to his readers. Read this book, then, but take care: it might change the way you relate to the world you inhabit.