In the spring of 2018, Brian Bartlett embarked on an experiment of going outdoors before sunrise to find what could be seen, heard, felt and thought in the days' earlier hours. Composed of entries drafted over 18 months, Daystart Songflight: A Morning Journal combines nature writing, travel, autobiography and reflections on reading. During in-the-field excursions Bartlett found more to learn about dawn, sunrise and morning than he'd imagined; in his reading he encountered morning thoughts by many sorts of writers, including naturalists, poets, painters, religious figures and translators from oral traditions. Following in the footsteps of his earlier plein-air work, Branches Over Ripples: A Waterside Journal, Bartlett's new book is characterized by close observation, a curious mind and a love for meandering. Bartlett is keen both to record the unique textures of particular mornings and to muse on how mornings overlap with each other. His layered prose is open to both concentration and digressiveness, poetry and science, memory and mindfulness, grief and humour. Aging, mortality and climate change are realities the author faces even while he observes and celebrates birds and other creatures, flowers and other plants, clouds and sunlight. More than half of the journal's entries were written in and about sites in Nova Scotia (including Halifax, Colchester, Lunenburg, Hants, Kings and Digby counties). Bartlett's travels also take him to other locations in the Atlantic Provinces, as well as to Maine, Montreal and Vancouver, southern Sweden and northern California.
