Book description
Birds are the most obvious wild things we have around us. They are
much watched and much loved, not least by poets.
Bird poetry is as old as British poetry itself, and a remarkable
number of poets have written poems about birds. Indeed some of the
most famous poems in the language concern birds, from Keats's
nightingale and Shelley's skylark to Yeats's swans and Hardy's thrush.
In this wonderful anthology poet Simon Armitage and birdwatching
enthusiast Tim Dee gather together the best of the past and the
present, including those famous poems but also many overlooked gems.
And in a fascinating divergence from standard anthology practice, the
poems are organized according to ornithological classification,
beginning with poems by Marianne Moore and David Wright on the ostrich
and the emperor penguin and ending with Emily Dickinson and Wallace
Stevens on the oriole and the blackbird.
Simon Armitage's Selected Poems appeared in 2001, and in
2007 he published a highly praised translation of Sir Gawain and
the Green Knight. He has written two volumes of memoir about
living in the north for Penguin: All Points North and Gig.
He lives in Huddersfield.
Tim Dee is a BBC radio producer based in Bristol. He has written
The Running Sky, a memoir of his birdwatching life.
