The Poetry of Birds: edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee

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The imagery of birds in flight serves as a metaphor for the human spirit yearning for transcendence and connection with the divine. Birds hold a special place in Kendall's poem, symbolizing freedom and the inherent connection between humans and the natural world. When the journal British Birds described the extremely uncharismatic pheasant swimming on the sea in 1952, it commented: "This is probably the only known case of a pheasant doing something interesting. In ‘Ode to a Nightingale,’ which is likely Keats’s best-known work, the nightingale plays an important role. Accordingly, Thomas Hardy’s 'The Darkling Thrush’ is one of two poems included about the mistle thrush rather than the song thrush or the simple thrush, which also have two poems each.

Evening Hawk' is, of course, centered on a bird, although it becomes a wider symbol over the course of the poem.Whether it’s a groundhog stealing garden tomatoes, a belted kingfisher perching “on a transmission wire” or the fig buttercup invading the porch, Limón’s poems put non-human subjects centre stage without rendering the humans irrelevant. It is no surprise that the sound of birds singing in the morning is so often romanticized – they inspire and delight us in equal measure. They eventually come to understand that the majesty of that Beloved is like the sun that can be seen reflected in a mirror. The dove is the central figure in the poem and represents all birds kept in captivity against their natural inclinations.

To many, birds are seen as nothing more than winged animals, devoid of mystery and character, but this does them a great disservice. Valley of Poverty and Annihilation, where the self disappears into the universe and the Wayfarer becomes timeless, existing in both the past and the future. One heavy day I ran away from the grim face of society and the dizzying clamor of the city and directed my weary step to the spacious alley. The book is augmented by a 'notes’ section which the editors claim is 'selective and subjective’, but nevertheless is rich in detail on the etymology of bird names, the species and the historical context and genesis of the poems.

A remarkable number of poets have noticed birds and British bird poetry is as old as British poetry. The book reads like a tug of war, in which concentrated sonnet-like poems about the role of the poet and the public vie with meandering, experimental, prosy pieces exploring personal memory and ancestral wounds. Jeremy Mynott has written (in his Birdscapes) of the "charisma" attaching to certain species, and here are all the poets' favourites: the corncrake, the skylark, the nightingale and the cuckoo. On the way, many perish of thirst, heat or illness, while others fall prey to wild beasts, panic, and violence. While the swallow migrates, the bird that lives in the speaker's heart is constantly there, giving birth to new loves and obsessions all the while.