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

(Paperback)

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Description

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. A remarkable number of poets have noticed birds and British bird poetry is as old as British poetry. Some of the best known, and most loved, poems in English are bird poems. Here poet Simon Armitage and amateur ornithologist Tim Dee gather the best of the past and the most promising of the present, as well as some overlooked gems. Poems are organised according to ornithological classification, and there are detailed ornithological notes which illuminate the poems and provide fascinating information on the birds. Altogether this is a truly original anthology.

Reviews

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 *

Author Bio

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 a highly acclaimed memoir of his birdwatching life, The Running Sky.