The Poetry of Birds
  • Published: 6 November 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141941868
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384
Categories:

The Poetry of Birds

edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee

Formats & editions
EBook
6 Nov 2009
Paperback
13 Apr 2011
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The best poems ever written about birds - a definitive new anthology

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.
  • Published: 6 November 2009
  • ISBN: 9780141941868
  • Imprint: Penguin eBooks
  • Format: EBook
  • Pages: 384
Categories:

Also by Simon Armitage

The Bayeux Tapestry
The Last Days of Troy
Gig
All Points North
The White Stuff
See all

Praise for The Poetry of Birds

Powerful. A rich and sustaining larder, a marvellously realized sourcebook of flights of feathered fancy

Guardian

Some of the most ethereal verse ever written

Sunday Telegraph

A glorious collection of works old and new

Independent on Sunday

Compendious . . . offers many pleasures

Daily Express

The poems gathered here celebrate our tenuous connection to something timeless and sublime. A truly inexhaustible collection . . . to be read again and again

Daily Mail

Had me entranced

Observer

A wonderful, generous anthology. A life-affirming celebration of the commonplace yet enduringly mysterious creatures we share this world with and the poetry they have inspired

Daily Telegraph
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