The Poets Guide to the Birds
The painter, Walter Inglis Anderson, once said that birds are the holes in heaven through which man may pass, and I think that many of us look upon birds with the kind of awe and wonder Anderson’s statement suggests. And, sometimes, poems about birds are better than seeing the birds themselves. Judith Kitchen and I, like enthusiastic birdwatchers, here point our fingers toward poems that might otherwise go unnoticed amidst the dense foliage of contemporary poetry. We hope our readers will enjoy this book just half as much as if they’d actually seen all the birds these poems represent.
–Ted Kooser, U.S. Poet Laureate 2004-2006