The imagery of birds in flight serves as a metaphor for the human spirit yearning for transcendence and connection with the divine.

Inspired by the song, he considers giving himself over to the woods and trying to discover the same kind of freedom the nightingale has. The poem itself echoes the earlier story of the "candle bird" he tells in "God's Gift to Women" – of a creature valued for its precious oil and rumoured to burn whole should a wick be placed in it.

The poems are set in acres of space which makes the reading experience pleasurable, as does the quality of the book design, right down to the striking red end papers. Leaving aside Baudelaire's "The Albatross", a Dafydd ap Gwilym poem and some Scots, Armitage and Dee have chosen not to venture beyond English, which is a pity.

I]t is not a bad thing for a book to leave readers wanting more when the readings are this perspicacious.

It details a harrowing night in the speaker’s life that includes incessant knocking and a talking raven that only says one word–“Nevermore. 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. Valley of Unity, where the Wayfarer realizes that everything is connected and that the Beloved is beyond everything, including harmony, multiplicity, and eternity.

They live a life that we frequently covet; who can honestly say they have never craved the freedom to simply fly away to wherever your heart desires? An ambitious intellectual powerhouse, the book is also lit up by many tender moments, such as “grief is not pointless, its mourning or melancholy offers something when there is nothing to show for death”. The Poetry of Birds is a rich and sustaining larder, a marvellously realised sourcebook of flights of feathered fancy. Mary later described the circumstances that gave rise to the poem: ‘It was on a beautiful summer evening while wandering among the lanes whose myrtle hedges were the bowers of the fire-flies, that we heard the carolling of the skylark.

Evening Hawk' is, of course, centered on a bird, although it becomes a wider symbol over the course of the poem.