Simon Armitage

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Rock 'n' Roll Dreams in a Northern Town

the bestselling memoir from the new Poet Laureate

All Points North

The White Stuff

The Poetry of Birds

Powerful. A rich and sustaining larder, a marvellously realized sourcebook of flights of feathered fancy

Some of the most ethereal verse ever written

A glorious collection of works old and new

Compendious . . . offers many pleasures

The poems gathered here celebrate our tenuous connection to something timeless and sublime. A truly inexhaustible collection . . . to be read again and again

A wonderful, generous anthology. A life-affirming celebration of the commonplace yet enduringly mysterious creatures we share this world with and the poetry they have inspired

edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee

A STUNNING COLLECTION OF POEMS CURATED BY THE NEW POET LAUREATE AND THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF FOUR FIELDS 
___________________________ 
 
'Some of the most ethereal verse ever written' Sunday Telegraph 
 
'A glorious collection of works old and new' Independent on Sunday 
 
'Truly inexhaustible . . . to be read again and again' Daily Mail 
 
'A rich and sustaining larder, a marvellously realized sourcebook of flights of feathered fancy' Guardian 
 
'A life-affirming celebration of the commonplace yet enduringly mysterious creatures we share this world with and the poetry they have inspired' Daily Telegraph

Simon Armitage's Selected Poems appeared in 2001, and in 2007 he published a highly praised translation of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. He has written two volumes of memoir about living in the north for Penguin: All Points North and Gig. He lives in Huddersfield. 
Tim Dee is a BBC radio producer based in Bristol. He has written The Running Sky, a memoir of his birdwatching life.

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.

The Poetry of Birds

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Simon Armitage

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