The Slain Birds by Michael Longley (Jonathan Cape, £12)
Birds are some of poetry’s most intimate and mysterious companions: think of the owl of Athena in The Odyssey, the albatross in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner or Ted Hughes’s philosophical crows. The Slain Birds opens with a tawny owl killed by a motorist, later found by Longley’s granddaughters, who make “sketches in charcoal” and hug the feathers. Using ornithology as a guide, Longley’s exhilarating songbook offers a risk assessment of our world under threat, while longing for a future for the next generation. Longley’s Midas touch never turns flora and fauna into gold, but makes foraged memories shimmer. His occasional poems capture transient places, people and events, but also a “soul-space” or “a state of mind”, as when he calls up “Otter-sightings, elvers, leverets, poetry, / The Owenadornaun’s five syllables”. Many syllables are devoted to birds in the book – the blackbird, cuckoo, flycatcher, eagle, godwit, house martin, nightingale, quail, raven, snipe and wren, to name just a few. This is counterbalanced by poignant homages to Homer, Edward Thomas, Ivor Gurney, Schubert, Mussorgsky and the great ornithologist David Cabot. The Slain Birds is a book of quietude and disquiet in Longley’s prolific repertoire, as the poet observes that “Silence that has lasted a thousand years / Is poetry of a kind”.
