Review
Sean McMahon delights in his first entirely bird themed anthology…
- The Poetry of Birds
- Penguin
Twitcher’s Delight
I’m sure there have been avian anthologies before this but none so ornithological specific.
Naturally Shelley’s skylark and Keats’s nightingale are included as well as 18 poems by John Clare, surely the most persistent of avian bards. Also present are the ostrich, the emperor penguin, the albatross, the gannet and 86 others. This roll-call of feathered friends is interrupted by two ‘days out’ dealing with more generalised but still avian topics.
The whole is a delight even though Armitage and Dee cheat from time to time. Including Yeats’s mythological ‘Leda and the Swan’ under the category ‘mute swan’ is naughty as is the inclusion of eight phoenixes. Some are stark ecological reminders as for example ‘The Last Moa’ by Fleur Adcock, herself from New Zealand – and a gesture towards the Jurassic with Edwin Morgan’s witty ‘The Archaeopteryx’s Song’. The last 44 pages give brief summaries of the included birds from a scientific point of view that prove nearly as interesting as the poems. The chauvinist in me mildly regrets that the only Irish inclusions are by Heaney, Longley, MacNeice and Yeats - and not a londubh in sight.
Sean McMahon