Carcanet Press Ltd

An Aviary of Small Birds is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art.

In the title poem, the speaker sits at the window of a small hotel room. The room is a holding zone, a temporary stopping-place between memory and possibility. In the Quaker Hotel is full of questions about the world. Rooted in nature, the poems are

'I dislike the idea of being a religious poet. I would prefer to be a poet for whom religious things mattered intensely.