On Wings of Song : Poems About Birds (Everyman's Library Pocket Poet)

Rating:
Summary: An Aviary of Delight
Review: J.D. McClatchy, a superb poet and the editor of The Yale Review, has put together a number of landmark anthologies over the years, including the Vintage Book of Contemporary American Poetry and Vintage Book of Contemporary World Poetry. For the Everyman's Library Pocket Poets series, he has co-edited an anthology of Christmas Poems with John Hollander. And, most recently, he has edited the Library of America's outstanding edition of the poems of Longfellow. But perhaps nowhere has he brought his refined taste and peerless editorial acumen to bear more beautifully than on this Everyman edition of some of the finest poems about birds in the English language-ON WINGS OF SONG.

McClatchy sets the tone for this collection in his elegant foreword: "At the very dawn of civilization, birds were symbols of the spirit. Falcon or dove, stork or raven or owl, they were our messengers, fierce or gentle intermediaries between our earthbound lives and the upper air." Keenly aware of emblematic types and the categories that they fall into, McClatchy carefully arranges the anthology accordingly. The list of poets that grace this anthology include many timeless masters, ranging from Virgil to Chaucer, from Wordsworth to Yeats, and from Poe to Frost.

The great Romantic era poems about birds, such as Shelley's "To a Skylark" and Keats's "To a Nightingale" are duly included, but the surprises in the collection are numerous. Among my favorites is a little-known four-line poem by the Anglo-Indian poet Vikram Seth, entitled "Pigeons": "The pigeons swing across the square/Suddenly voiceless in midair,/Flaunting, against their civic coats,/The glossy oils that scarf their throats." A number of the poems are also downright funny. Chief among these is X.J. Kennedy's sardonic "Vulture": "The vulture's very like a sack/Set down and left there drooping./His crooked neck and creaky back/Look badly bent from stooping/Down to the ground to eat dead cows/So they won't go to waste/Thus making up in usefulness/For what he lacks in taste."

McClatchy does a masterful job of arranging the poems in a manner that refreshes and surprises the reader at every turn. ON THE WINGS OF SONG is a must have on every birdwatcher's and verse lover's shelf.

Rating:
Summary: Splendid
Review: This Pocket Poets series has done us a great favor by publishing these short collections of a central theme. Past volumes focused on common poetic themes (i.e. love, war, friendship), and while there has already been a volume on animal poems, one devoted to bird poems is certainly time- and paper-worthy.

This little book gives lovers of poetry (and of birds) a chance to indulge in the seemingly forbidden enjoyment, in today's poetic world, of poetry as an ebullient celebration of the simple and mundane. With so many poets of our time are so caught up with catharsis, neuroses, unresolved parental issues, and the like, it's difficult to imagine those poets taking the focus off themselves long enough to consider something like birds, let alone write poems about them. Fortunately, as this book enchantingly demonstrates, our poetic heritage is too rich to let us forget that poet craft has a vast voice to speak of many things, and with a topic such as birds, the poem has the power to shake us out of our indifference to the ordinary, letting us see its beauty by honoring with beauty.

I presently own all the volumes of the Pocket Poets series to date, and this volume easily ranks among my favorites. It includes a fascinatingly broad range of poetic literature from the Bible to contemporaries like Seamus Heaney, and its last section pays homage to "famous" birds in poetry, such as Coleridge's albatross and Poe's raven. It's worth every cent, and has a very attractive dust jacket to boot, so you'll be tempted to leave it out on your coffee table just to impress your friends.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful gathering of literary verse revolving around birds
Review: This pocket-sized hardcover of poems about birds provides a beautiful gathering of literary verse revolving around birds, separated by general bird categories from 'backyard' and 'barnyard' to 'birds of prey' and beyond. A fine gift for a literary birder.