The Poetry of Birds

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' nightingale and Shelley's skylark to Yeats' 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.

ISBN 0670916412   Pages 384 ISBN13 9780670916412 (What's this?)   Weight (grammes) 643 Publisher Penguin Books Ltd   Published in London Imprint Viking   Height (mm) 240 Format Hardback   Width (mm) 162 Publication date 01 Oct 2009   Spine width (mm) 35 DEWEY 821.914   Academic level General DEWEY edition DC22

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