Writing Worth Reading
Writing Worth Reading
Birds pop up in poetry all the time, and my favourite nature poet is John Clare, whom I like because he has got such a wonderful eye and ear for birds. He’s a very good observer. He was brought up in rural Northamptonshire as a poor farm labourer, and he had an intense feeling for his local landscape and a very deep knowledge of all the wildlife around him.
Your next choice is a book of poetry by John Clare.
Birds are very prominent in poetry. Think of Shelley and the skylark, Browning and the thrush, Keats and the nightingale – and Coleridge and the albatross. Birds pop up in poetry all the time, and my favourite nature poet is John Clare, whom I like because he has got such a wonderful eye and ear for birds and such a strong ‘sense of place’. He’s a very good observer. He was brought up in rural Northamptonshire as a poor farm labourer, and he had an intense feeling for his local landscape and a very deep knowledge of all the wildlife around him. And he was a wonderful describer of birds. Whereas Keats speaks from his imagination, Clare speaks from experience. I quote him extensively in my book and include quite a few of his poems. He’s got a wonderful eye for just seeing exactly what the birds really are like, and seeing them as part of the landscape that he knew so well. He wrote about many other subjects too, but a lot of his best poems are about birds.
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Jeremy Mynott is a Fellow of Wolfson College, Cambridge and the former chief executive of Cambridge University Press. Throughout his career, he spent his hard-won leisure time pursuing his interest in birds in many parts of the world. He now lives in Suffolk, though he still makes regular excursions to watch birds in favourite places including the Hebrides, the Isles of Scilly, the Volga Delta and New York’s Central Park. He has devoted much thought to the place of birds in our lives and the reasons we react to them as we do, culminating in his book, Birdscapes: Birds in Our Imagination and Experience, which was published by Princeton University Press in March 2009. He is currently translating Thucydides for the Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought series, and his next project will be an anthology of writings about birds in the ancient world.
