The Poetry of Birds

Download or read book The Poetry of Birds written by Simon Armitage and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2011 with total page 417 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: 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.