A woodcock 'scooping up autumn' and a snipe 'pinballing' into the sky - the strange imaginings of a birder-poet

 

Super-imaginative - Lancashire-based Phil Barnett

"WHEN the god drew the world in pencil and coloured outside the lines, all the birds were born."

So writes Lancashire birder Phil Barnett in one of the inclusions in  his collection of 41 poems that is due to be published on  January 25.

There is an intensity to his poetry that derives both from his powerful imagination and from the fact that, during a decade of debilitating illness, he was often confined to a chair gazing through the window at the avian comings and goings in his garden.

Mercifully, Barnett does not "Disneyfy" his birds - he does not present them as little cartoon characters in feathered coats.

Instead, he scrutinises their behaviour, then captures a fleeting instant of it with an often startling turn of phrase

Flight seems to be a favourite theme - for instance, a flushed snipe "pinballing off an invisible stairwell" as it zig-zags into the sky or a woodcock "scooping up the autumn" as it weaves through "a barn dance of willows" and disappears out of view.

Sometimes, there is resentment, bordering on anger. 

On one occasion , because he is too weak to move, Barnett feels as if he is  "encased in granite", and he finds himself cursing the free-flying housemartins as they "play chase with here and over there, batting away distance for the fun of it".  

Although birds dominate, other wildlife feature - most vividly a dragonfly with "staring-contest, kestrel-steady eyes" which comes so close that he is moved to write: "I feel the wind of its judgement".

Judged by a dragonfly? What an extraordinary concept! Who would have ever thought it?

Birds Knit My Ribs Together is published in paperback at £9.99 (plus £2.30 postage) by Arachne Press, 100 Grierson Road. London, SE23 1NX.