The Poets Guide to the Birds

Poetry. Ted Kooser was moving all his books from his shed to his new library, and in the process he was dipping into them. ‘I’ve been coming up with a list of good bird poems, ’ he e-mailed. ‘Can you think of any others?’ Well, of course, there were the classics–by Hopkins, and Frost, and Bishop–but what else came to mind? I began to scan my own shelves. Just in our own collections (Ted’s in Nebraska, mine in upstate New York), we unearthed over a thousand poems with birds as their focus (or at least their central image). It was clear from the sheer volume that birds have fuelled the poetic imagination, turning American poets into bird watchers of sorts, and so we conceived of this Poets Guide –Judith Kitchen, from the Introduction