The Poetry of Birds

Author: Simon Armitage
Publisher: Penguin UK
ISBN: 0141027118
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 417

Book Description
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.

Bright Wings

Author: Billy Collins
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 0231150873
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 288

Book Description
In this beautiful collection of poems and paintings, Billy Collins, former U.S. poet laureate, joins with David Allen Sibley, America's foremost bird illustrator, to celebrate the winged creatures that have inspired so many poets to sing for centuries. From Catullus and Chaucer to Robert Browning and James Wright, poets have long treated birds as powerful metaphors for beauty, escape, transcendence, and divine expression. Here, in this substantial anthology, more than one hundred contemporary and classic poems are paired with close to sixty original, ornithologically precise illustrations. Part poetry collection, part field guide, part art book, Bright Wings presents verbal and visual interpretations of the natural world and reminds us of our intimate connection to the "bright wings" around us. Each in their own way, these poems and pictures honor the enchanting creatures that have been, and continue to be, longtime collaborators with the poet's and painter's art. Poet and bird pairings include: Wallace Stevens and the Blackbird; Emily Dickinson and the Robin; Marianne Moore and the Frigate Pelican; Thomas Hardy and the Goldfinch; Sylvia Plath and the Pheasant; John Updike and the Seagull; Walt Whitman and the Eagle; Billy Collins and the Sparrow.

Feathers

Author: Eileen Spinelli
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 9780805067132
Category : Juvenile Nonfiction
Languages : en
Pages : 48

Book Description
More than twenty-five poems about both common and unusual birds.

Birds in the Hand

Author: Dylan Nelson
Publisher: North Point Press
ISBN: 1429928050
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 454

Book Description
A unique anthology of avian literature From the myths of ancient Greece to the fables of Aesop, from Chaucer to contemporary poetry and fiction, birds are central to literature because they connect us intimately to the natural world. Whether we watch birds at our feeders, travel vast distances to identify rare species, or simply pause in a busy day to listen to the coo of a dove or the trill of a warbler, birds sustain us. Birds in the Hand is a collection of contemporary fiction and poetry that explores the complex, often startling ways in which birds shed light upon our lives. In work from a diverse and celebrated group of contemporary authors such as Charles Baxter, T.C. Boyle, Jim Harrison, Flannery O'Connor, Pattiann Rogers, Seamus Heaney, Derek Walcott, Ethan Canin, and Jorie Graham, birds are sources of inspiration, confrontation, and revelation. These stories and poems take us from New York and Hoboken to the Salton Sea and the wilds of Montana, from a hardware store to the westernmost Aleutian island, from a prison to marshes, forests, and seacoasts. Field guides and natural history books cannot capture the essence of why birds thrill us. Birds in the Hand uses the vitality and nuance of fiction and poetry to get at the heart of our mysterious sense of birds and the way they can reflect the brightest and darkest aspects of our own natures.

A Theory of Birds

Author: Zaina Alsous
Publisher: University of Arkansas Press
ISBN: 1610756746
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 89

Book Description
Winner of the 2019 Etel Adnan Poetry Prize Inside the dodo bird is a forest, Inside the forest a peach analog, Inside the peach analog a woman, Inside the woman a lake of funerals This layering of bird, woman, place, technology, and ceremony, which begins this first full-length collection by Zaina Alsous, mirrors the layering of insights that marks the collection as a whole. The poems in A Theory of Birds draw on inherited memory, historical record, critical theory, alternative geographies, and sharp observation. In them, birds—particularly extinct species—become metaphor for the violences perpetrated on othered bodies under the colonial gaze. Putting ecological preservation in conversation with Arab racial formation, state vernacular with the chatter of birds, Alsous explores how categorization can be a tool for detachment, domination, and erasure. Stretching their wings toward de-erasure, these poems—their subjects and their logics—refuse to stay put within a single category. This is poetry in support of a decolonized mind.

The Book of Birds

Author: William Wordsworth
Publisher: Read Books Ltd
ISBN: 1528789393
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 42

Book Description
This beautiful pocket-sized volume is a compilation of William Wordsworth’s poetry on birds. The collection includes lyrical, melancholic poems alongside whimsical pieces that will make readers’ heart’s soar. With themes of freedom, hope and love in The Book of Birds Wordsworth uses darker imagery to express his innermost thoughts and views of the world through the beautiful imagery of birds. This carefully curated book collates some of the poet’s most inspiring work as well as a few of his seminal pieces. This collection includes fantastic poems such as: - The Green Linnet - To a Sky-lark, 1807 - To the Cuckoo - The Sparrow’s Nest - A Wren’s Nest - Animal Tranquillity and Decay - The Contrast – The Parrot and the Wren Proudly republished by Read & Co. Books Ragged Hand, Wordsworth’s Poetry on Birds is now in a new compact, pocket-sized edition. This collection is completed by an introductory excerpt from Reminiscences, 1881, by Thomas Carlyle, and would make the perfect gift for lovers of birds and collectors of Wordsworth’s poetry.

Red Bird

Author: Mary Oliver
Publisher: Beacon Press
ISBN: 9780807068922
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 102

Book Description
Red bird came all winter / firing up the landscape / as nothing else could. So begins Mary Oliver's twelfth book of poetry, and the image of that fiery bird stays with the reader, appearing in unexpected forms and guises until, in a postscript, he explains himself: "For truly the body needs / a song, a spirit, a soul. And no less, to make this work, / the soul has need of a body, / and I am both of the earth and I am of the inexplicable / beauty of heaven / where I fly so easily, so welcome, yes, / and this is why I have been sent, to teach this to your heart." This collection of sixty-one new poems, the most ever in a single volume of Oliver's work, includes an entirely new direction in the poet's work: a cycle of eleven linked love poems-a dazzling achievement. As in all of Mary Oliver's work, the pages overflow with her keen observation of the natural world and her gratitude for its gifts, for the many people she has loved in her seventy years, as well as for her disobedient dog, Percy. But here, too, the poet's attention turns with ferocity to the degradation of the Earth and the denigration of the peoples of the world by those who love power. Red Bird is unquestionably Mary Oliver's most wide-ranging volume to date.

A Spicing of Birds

Author: Emily Dickinson
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819570699
Category : Nature
Languages : en
Pages : 113

Book Description
The bird poems of a revered American poet paired with classic bird illustrations

Every Day Birds

Author: Amy Ludwig VanDerwater
Publisher: Scholastic Inc.
ISBN: 0545699819
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 36

Book Description
Young readers get an introduction to twenty different types of birds, with breathtaking paper-cuts by newcomer Dylan Metrano! "Chickadee wears a wee black cap.Jay is loud and bold.Nuthatch perches upside-down.Finch is clothed in gold."Young readers are fascinated with birds in their world. Every Day Birds helps children identify and learn about common birds. After reading Every Day Birds, families can look out their windows with curiosity--recognizing birds and nests and celebrating the beauty of these creatures!Every Day Birds focuses on twenty North American birds, with a poem and descriptions written by Amy Ludwig VanDerwater and beautiful paper-cuttings by first-time picture book illustrator Dylan Metrano. Interesting facts about each bird are featured in the back of the book.

Birds

Author: Judith Wright
Publisher: National Library Australia
ISBN: 9780642107749
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 92

Book Description
The poems are complemented by full-colour illustrations drawn from the National Library's Pictures Collection, featuring the work of artists such as John Lewin, Lionel Lindsay, Lilian Medland, William T. Cooper and Betty TempleWatts.