Lapwing

by Hannah Copley

Second Prize Winner of the Laurel Prize 2024

Shortlisted for the 2024 T. S. Eliot Prize

Poetry Book Society Recommendation Summer 2024

Featuring the poem 'Is that all?' (Highly Commended in The Forward Prizes for Poetry)

Migrating across voices and blurring the divide between bird and human, self and other, Hannah Copley’s Lapwing explores restlessness, love, and ecological and personal grief in a vivid and incantatory sequence of poems.

A lyrical biography of a bird and a fragmented study of a flawed and mutable creature bearing its name, Copley’s second collection takes inspiration from John Gower’s brid falseste of alle and its many literary guises. At the heart of the book are the shifting figures of Lapwing and Peet, two creatures whose overlapping narratives echo the double note of the bird’s cry. In Lapwing, known by countless names, migratory, and slowly disappearing beneath addiction, Copley examines a life in a slow tumble, as we are transported into a world shaped by real and imagined predators. Running alongside Lapwing is the searching voice of Peet, a daughter left to understand her father’s vanishing while trying to make a life in a habitat no longer fit for survival.

Bold, exacting, and deeply personal, Copley’s poems call out from empty nests, drained wetlands, and ploughed fields to create a soundscape of endangerment and wonder. *Lapwing *asks that we consider how, like the bird itself, we must all dissemble to survive.

Genres: Poetry, Birds

72 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2024

Reviews

[JP Seabright · Rating 5 out of 5]

A truly stunning collection, so beautifully crafted and presented. I love everything about this book and forced myself to read it slowly so as to savour it. From the font and the subtle but poignant reoccurrence of (punctuated) birds in flight across the pages, to the daring and tender concept, both experimental and heartfelt, this is an absolute must-read. Copley’s poetry achieves the rare balance of being both jazz-loose and tightly woven, with poignant and playful phrases and images. My favourite new collection so far this year. A remarkable achievement, made even more so for tackling with such exquisite yearning the painful legacy of addiction.

[Lilac FB · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful collection. A few of the poems in here I've had to read over and over one of them I'd say is one of my top favourite poems!

[Oliver · Rating 3.5 out of 5]

I'm not sure what I think of this. It felt sad. I don't think I understood a lot of it.

[Corinna Board · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this collection, Hannah Copley has given a voice to the more-than-human, interlacing it with the personal in a sequence of breath-taking poems. Wonderful!

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Here // in the church of the heart / lost objects abound. Here in the church / of the heart // I am the tallest thing for miles.” Hannah Copley’s Lapwing, a poetry collection of murmurations and migrations, feathers and flutters and flight, is birdlike in so many ways — its clear aesthetic beauty, its strangeness of motion, its piercing clarity of sound. ‘Mnemonic technique’, where the above quote is from, is one of many fruitful pieces in Copley’s swooping, elliptical book; in that same poem, she writes about “One last impression / of what once split a heart // imprinted in a finely painted / blood map. Life forever unlocated // on the shell.” Highlights in the collection also include the rhythmic and brightly evocative ‘VII’, and the slowingly tender ‘XXIV’, which reads (in its entirety): “Belly risen; lung full; the never-ceasing shake. / Lapwing, heart sore. Just a small bird, otherwise known / as homesick boy, as a broken body settling / into a strange field.” Lapwing and Peet are two birds circling each other, literally, narratively, and the distance between them is at the heart of what makes the collection so moving. “Peet leaning in close enough to hear / his heart’s violent thrum against the steady gust / of each commuter.” “A safe acreage between them. / Let him fashion his own flight home. Let him / disintegrate.” “Grief, she thinks, // is just an inflammation / of memory; // a fine tendon / slowly ripping itself // from wingtip / to beak.” Epigraphs by Gower and Joyce set the scene for Copley’s fixation on sound and rhythm, the meaning of storytelling for all of us “poised / to scratch for a more tender language”.

[Nasnin Sulfath Nasser · Rating 5 out of 5]

Lapwing offered me an entirely novel experience, as it artfully blends the bird and the human realms in an ethereal way, where the voice of one is deeply entangled with the voice of the other, yet remains distinct in the light of poetic creation. It took me some time to move from one poem to the next, as she writes in one of her poems: “There is no looking backwards when flying. It is only/ from a point of stillness that the rotation/ can begin.” As I delved into my own quest for identity, the search for lost roots, and the imagined grief of potentially losing loved ones, these very poems also provided me a space for stillness, compelling me to reflect, seek solace, and reconcile my grief, preparing me to resume another rotation. As we all migrate and strive to survive through various phases, Lapwing merges the human cry and the avian cry with profound tenderness. The reader realises that living involves learning to soar, hover, know when to alight, and when to resume the flight, and sometimes to shield one’s wings to protect oneself from both real and perceived threats. As one of the commentators mentions in the book, “I have not read anything quite like it”! My personal favourites are ‘Is that all?’, ‘Missing’, ‘How endangered birds keep in touch’, ‘Mnemonic technique’, poem number XV, ‘In which we can reinvent everything about ourselves in response’, ‘Which rotation?’, and many more.

[Lidia Karanfilovszka Zikic · Rating 5 out of 5]

This collection is such a masterful act of creativity, with such a unique voice. I'm not even fully aware of what just happened to me. I was taken on the most unusual lyrical journey that still echoes within me. It unites a lot of things I could connect to and I also felt understood, like someone wrote how I feel. This is so much more then a story of two birds. First, the language is so rich and enhanced with meaning that I was often caught contemplating on how can one achieve this. How do you arrange everything in such a way to convey those sounds and meanings? The closest thing I could think of was - I guess you follow some inner call. The phonetics of the lines were so quintessential almost like music or like bird song 🎵
I loved the 'otherwise known' and it's variations throughout. I'm so intrigued of creative processes and this one is so unique. The language was kind of a barrier to me. It took me some time to search for all the words I did not know 😊, but this did not spoil the flow and the understanding for me. I was also wondering how the poems would sound when translated in my native language, Macedonian. Or can they even be translated to convey the full meaning of the language they originally came from? I just discovered that lapwing is called Kalugerka in my native language (it is a female noun, meaning a nun). Калуѓерка. How interesting...
Secondly, the world of this story... The ornithological way of life, the chickhood :), the migration, the endangered species, makes me reflect on nature's way of replicating human behaviour in different life forms, animals, even plants and it shows us how everything is interlinked.
Third, the personal father-daughter relationship, put through the scope of birds, so original, so well observed, so difficult to get over. This was quite emotional for me. 'Grief is just an inflammation of memory' will stay with me. Lapwing will stay with me.

[Jayant Kashyap · Rating 5 out of 5]

I totally totally love this collection – ‘Perhaps,/ this is the flight path/ into my own bitterness,/ or rather away from it’ – about the loss of a parent, and about loss in general, both of which I think I understand better now than I did half a year ago, early (or even mid-) 2024 or so. I know I’m going to keep coming back to this collection, and this thought in particular – ‘Just that everything he says sounds like a question.’

By the way, the little piece titled ‘Miscellaneous wants’!!

[Ailsa · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was absolutely gorgeous. I loved the language, the conceits, and how the poet draw on different cultural ideas of the lapwing to tell a very personal story. I'm not a seasoned poetry reader so I struggled to follow what the overarching story was, or exactly what was happening, but each poem was beautiful on its own I wanted to keep reading, even if I never fully understood.

[han · Rating 4 out of 5]

a beautifully written piece of art. although not entirely understanding the overarching process and experimentation, i could understand the metaphorical message and tie between bird and human, i enjoyed this collection

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

I don’t jive much with lyric poetry so much but this was so artfully and meticulously crafted you can’t help but to admire it. So many beautiful poems in here I would like to come back to.