Bird Poetry, The PenguiN Book of

Rare 1984 Softcover Edition out of a private nonsmoking estate in Fine Condition. Tight spine, great covers, clear, crisp pages, slight rub marks on corners from light shelf wear. Ships same day as... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0140422781
• ISBN13: 9780140422788
• Release Date: October 1984
• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Length: 368 Pages
• Weight: 0.60 lbs.
• Dimensions: 5.0" x 1.0" x 7.0"

Customer Reviews

A treasurehouse of British bird poetry

Peggy Munsterberg's praises should be sung from the treetops - and from the bushes and shrubs that usually conceal the top bird here, the nightingale. 57 of the 266 poems here refer to that most elusive of songbirds. Silver goes to the skylark (45) and bronze (44) to the British (not American) robin. As she notes, roughly one-third of Britain's birds are shared with the USA, one-third are similar, and one third completely different. But three of those most prominent in British poetry are foreign - at least in local gardens and fieldtrips - to American birdlovers and poets: the cuckoo, skylarks and the nightingale. Some local variants will be unfamiliar - thrush, throstle, blackbird, merle, ouzel, woosel - thus the useful glossary of bird names in both British and American English. This anthology and its 74-page introduction are exemplary in choice of poems and in judgements that are always expressed with wit and elegance, e.g.:" What makes [typical Romantic bird poems] seem so new is the way the poet explores the experience. In 105 lines, Shelley tells us no more about the lark itself than Gray does in four. But he showers us with a cascade of images that become an ecstatic equivalent of the song. (An American poet, on first hearing the skylark, said that Shelley sang a better song to the lark than the lark sang to Shelley.)" Especially in the USA the book should have a more precise title - "British Bird Poetry from the 9th to the 19th century." None of the poets were born in the 20th century and all are from the British Isles (none from the USA or other English-speaking countries). This narrower focus is welcome. It allows closer examination of changing poetic sensibilities as the corbies and ravens of early battlefields give way to mediaeval hunting hawks in their own courtly hierarchy and then to the different priorities Jacobean, Augustan and Romantic poets gave to what they knew and felt about the natural world and their relationship to it. With urbanisation, most of us now know "our" birds (wherever we live) through poetry or YouTube videos. In contrast, what gave John Clare (1793-1864) his "genius for graphic description" was walking daily through fields and woods reverberating with warbles, coos, churrs and caws. The introduction suggests that if Julius Caesar went back to Britain the landscape and the people would have changed, but "the gulls screaming around the boats would be perfectly familiar. ...What changes is not the birds, but the way man looks at the birds." Since this was written (in 1980), it is increasingly clear that the birds are changing too: there are now more mandarin ducks in the wild in Britain than in China Increasingly, Britain's birds owe their habitats to the vagaries of European Union farming subsidies; and global warming is certain to change the mix of species that struggle to maintain their places in the overcrowded British Isles. The UK's 22nd century poets will struggle to retain their