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As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Birds & Books
When Alex Preston was 15, he stopped being a birdwatcher. Adolescence and the scorn of his peers made him put away his binoculars, leave behind the hides and the nature reserves and the quiet companionship of his fellow birders. His love of birds didn't disappear though. Rather, it went underground, and he began birdwatching in the books that he read, creating his own personal anthology of nature writing that brought the birds of his childhood back to brilliant life.
Looking for moments 'when heart and bird are one', Preston weaves the very best writing about birds into a personal and eccentric narrative that is as much about the joy of reading and writing as it is about the thrill of wildlife. Moving from the 'high requiem' of Keats's nightingale to the crow-strewn sky at the end of Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, from Ted Hughes's brooding 'Hawk in the Rain' to the giddy anthropomorphism of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, this is a book that will make you look at birds, at the world, in a newer, richer light.
Beautifully illustrated and illuminated by the celebrated graphic artist Neil Gower, As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a book to love and to hold, to return to again and again, to marvel at the way that authors across the centuries have captured the endless grace and variety of birds.
Looking for moments 'when heart and bird are one', Preston weaves the very best writing about birds into a personal and eccentric narrative that is as much about the joy of reading and writing as it is about the thrill of wildlife. Moving from the 'high requiem' of Keats's nightingale to the crow-strewn sky at the end of Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, from Ted Hughes's brooding 'Hawk in the Rain' to the giddy anthropomorphism of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, this is a book that will make you look at birds, at the world, in a newer, richer light.
Beautifully illustrated and illuminated by the celebrated graphic artist Neil Gower, As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a book to love and to hold, to return to again and again, to marvel at the way that authors across the centuries have captured the endless grace and variety of birds.
208 pages, Hardcover
Published July 13, 2017
16 people are currently reading
233 people want to read
About the author
Alex Preston
20 books38 followersAlex Preston was born in 1979. He is an award-winning author and journalist who appears regularly on BBC television and radio. He writes for GQ, Harper's Bazaar and Town & Country Magazine as well as for the Observer's New Review. He teaches Creative Writing at the University of Kent and regular Guardian Masterclasses.
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Displaying 1 - 23 of 23 reviews
May 18, 2019
I love everything about this book, the hardback cover is a close-up of a kingfisher, you can clearly see the fire in the feathers, the paper used is thick and a joy to turn, each time I thought I was turning two pages at once when it was only one and it made me smile each time. The content is a fusion of birds, books, poetry, autobiography and art.
Alex Preston shares the moments in his life when he falls in love with each bird featured here, these scenes are well written, from being shown his first bird by an aunt to his father battling cancer in bed being watched over by Collared Doves, you can really sense his love for these feathery creatures.
I knew that poets and writers over the years had been influenced by birds in their writing but I never realised just how much they were ingrained into their work. D. H. Lawrence especially uses them a lot, Ted Hughes too, I knew he had his book called "Crow" but so many more birds influenced him, I think he gets a mention in most chapters. This book has greatly increased my reading list. My favourite clip of a poem mentioned has to be about Heron's by Paul Farley:
"One of the most begrudging avian take-offs
is the heron's fucking hell, all right, all right,
I'll go the garage for your flaming fags
cranky departure"
Also featured was one of my favourite poems, written by Kathleen Jamie about geese:
"Whit dae birds write on the dusk?
A word niver spoken or read.
The skeins turn hame,
on the wind's dumb moan, a soun,
maybe human, bereft."
Finally there is the art work by Neil Gower, absolutely stunning, it blends perfectly with the prose on the pages and he has captured the birds perfectly. My favourite has to be of the Wrens, he has reproduced their bossiness, you can almost hear them shouting at you to move along and go walk by another hedge.
This book is highly recommended by me, you've gotta own a copy even if you aren't a bird lover.
My Blog review is here: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2017...
Notes on the second reading: The poems and clips of other writers work have been taken from Alex Notebooks over the last 25 years, I find it awesome that he has read something he likes and has copied it down in a notebook. Info about the Dove, a bird associated with peace, it made the most of WWII to spread far and wide. Finally, I love how Neil Gower has made the Nightingale look like one of the most beautiful birds ever.
Alex Preston shares the moments in his life when he falls in love with each bird featured here, these scenes are well written, from being shown his first bird by an aunt to his father battling cancer in bed being watched over by Collared Doves, you can really sense his love for these feathery creatures.
I knew that poets and writers over the years had been influenced by birds in their writing but I never realised just how much they were ingrained into their work. D. H. Lawrence especially uses them a lot, Ted Hughes too, I knew he had his book called "Crow" but so many more birds influenced him, I think he gets a mention in most chapters. This book has greatly increased my reading list. My favourite clip of a poem mentioned has to be about Heron's by Paul Farley:
"One of the most begrudging avian take-offs
is the heron's fucking hell, all right, all right,
I'll go the garage for your flaming fags
cranky departure"
Also featured was one of my favourite poems, written by Kathleen Jamie about geese:
"Whit dae birds write on the dusk?
A word niver spoken or read.
The skeins turn hame,
on the wind's dumb moan, a soun,
maybe human, bereft."
Finally there is the art work by Neil Gower, absolutely stunning, it blends perfectly with the prose on the pages and he has captured the birds perfectly. My favourite has to be of the Wrens, he has reproduced their bossiness, you can almost hear them shouting at you to move along and go walk by another hedge.
This book is highly recommended by me, you've gotta own a copy even if you aren't a bird lover.
My Blog review is here: https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2017...
Notes on the second reading: The poems and clips of other writers work have been taken from Alex Notebooks over the last 25 years, I find it awesome that he has read something he likes and has copied it down in a notebook. Info about the Dove, a bird associated with peace, it made the most of WWII to spread far and wide. Finally, I love how Neil Gower has made the Nightingale look like one of the most beautiful birds ever.
September 6, 2018
A simply gorgeous physical book: the orange cloth spine; the electric-blue feather detail on the cover; the Escher-esque interlocking kingfishers on the endpapers; and the full-color illustrations (by Neil Gower) opening each chapter. 5 stars on appearance. But the contents? I don’t really value books like this that are mostly composed of quotes from other authors; they strike me as lazy or even cheaty. I expected much more of a straightforward memoir of Preston’s life with birds. As it is, the autobiographical material is parceled out in a miserly fashion, as if the author was putting in the bare minimum before getting back to all the literary passages he was so clever to have found in his years of reading. If this wasn’t going to be a memoir, I would have preferred it to be an anthology of poetry and prose extracts. The attempt at combining the two didn’t succeed for me particularly well. It works best in my favorite chapter, “Waxwings,” in which an experience of coming across a flock of waxwings while in Siberia for a literary festival leads him into a consideration of Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
October 16, 2017
It was Alex Preston’s Aunt that foster his love of the natural world and birds in particular. But in his teenage years, skateboarding and listening to Niverna was considered much cooler by his peers than being stuck in a draughty hide. This passion was suppressed but it never went away. Instead, Preston was drawn into an avian world between the covers of books where the poetry and writings from luminaries such as Dillard and Fiennes, Hardy and Hughes. It took another decade and a half for him to feel comfortable in the things that he wanted to do and this reignited his desire to watch birds again.
Taking us through twenty-one birds as exotic as the blue streak that is the kingfisher and the inspiration for the title of the book, the tiny wren, and the speed of the swifts, Preston extols the virtues of each, weaving in poetry and prose taken from the books that made an impact as he grew up. There are personal stories too, his father with cancer, being alone deep into Russia and his wedding in December. All of these memories are written with a stark honesty.
Each of the twenty-one chapters is fronted by a breath-taking image created by the graphic artist Neil Gower. These full sizes colour plates show the bird is a typical scene, a peregrine in a stoop, the murmurations of the starlings, Skylarks float over golden fields and the silence of the barn owl. Scattered throughout are black and white sketches of the birds and other objects, even the endpapers are a thing of beauty; the kingfishers that make up the pattern are caught by Gower in that moment as they dive to fish. Whilst I have read some of the books that he mentions in the text I now have a longer list of items that I want to read. Preston has got to the very essence of what makes the natural world and birds in particular necessary to make ourselves whole. The book is so well produced, with its spectacular cover, high quality pages and tactile binding. It is a joy to hold and a delight to read.
Review with pictures on my blog:
http://halfmanhalfbook.blogspot.co.uk...
Taking us through twenty-one birds as exotic as the blue streak that is the kingfisher and the inspiration for the title of the book, the tiny wren, and the speed of the swifts, Preston extols the virtues of each, weaving in poetry and prose taken from the books that made an impact as he grew up. There are personal stories too, his father with cancer, being alone deep into Russia and his wedding in December. All of these memories are written with a stark honesty.
Each of the twenty-one chapters is fronted by a breath-taking image created by the graphic artist Neil Gower. These full sizes colour plates show the bird is a typical scene, a peregrine in a stoop, the murmurations of the starlings, Skylarks float over golden fields and the silence of the barn owl. Scattered throughout are black and white sketches of the birds and other objects, even the endpapers are a thing of beauty; the kingfishers that make up the pattern are caught by Gower in that moment as they dive to fish. Whilst I have read some of the books that he mentions in the text I now have a longer list of items that I want to read. Preston has got to the very essence of what makes the natural world and birds in particular necessary to make ourselves whole. The book is so well produced, with its spectacular cover, high quality pages and tactile binding. It is a joy to hold and a delight to read.
Review with pictures on my blog:
http://halfmanhalfbook.blogspot.co.uk...
January 2, 2023
It will be obvious to anyone who knows me why my wife bought this book for me as a Christmas present. The front cover gives it a subtitle of “Books And Birds”. Let’s acknowledge here that my photography has now gone beyond what could legitimately be called a hobby - this then means that my two main actual hobbies are reading and birdwatching. This book should be a perfect match for me.
And, I think the author had something perfect for me in mind. In the introduction he says:
If this book works as I want it to, it’ll appeal to birder and non-birder alike. I‘d love it to be as vital a companion to ornithologists as their field guides, illuminating all the webs of meaning, of joy that birds spin out behind them: triangulating between the bird, the world and literature.
For all these reasons I opened the book full of anticipation.
Here’s the point where I acknowledge a sense of disappointment that grew in me as I read. A sense of disappointment that did gradually fade but never quite went away. Each chapter focuses on a different bird, twenty-one of them. Each chapter opens with a full-page illustration of the bird by Neil Gower, and further small illustrations are at the start and end of the text for each chapter. But it was the text that bothered me as all the chapters seemed to take the same format which consists of collecting together many, many quotes from novels and poetry that refer to each bird. That in itself would be fine. What I found didn’t work for me is the lack of anything else in the book: it seems to string together quote after quote without providing anything extra. True, each chapter starts with some kind of anecdote, but certainly a lot of the early chapters then seem to descend into multiple quotes.
It's also true that there are some chapters where the author lets his hair down and gives us an insight into himself and his relationship with birds. Hoping for another of these is what kept me going because there were some tantalising snippets that would make a fascinating pieces if they were expanded.
Towards the end of the book, I found myself slightly revising my opinion. I don’t think the basic style changed very much. But I did begin to look back over the book and think about what it had been presenting to me. And what I found myself thinking about is how different birds have come to symbolise different things in human emotion. The crow, made famous by Ted Hughes, carries the burden of darkness in our imagination. The curlew speaks of loneliness or isolation (notice whenever a TV program wants to let you know you are in the middle of nowhere you will hear a curlew call). The barn owl (or owls in general, really) seem to conjure up the spiritual world. And so it goes on.
As a long-term birdwatcher, I might be slightly over-enthusiastic about this.
So, if you want a good overview of how different birds are represented in literature, then this would be a good book for you to read. I am less convinced that it is a “vital companion to ornithologists”. Which is a shame. It probably deserves a slightly higher rating than I am giving it, but all my ratings are more about my feelings about a book than they are about the quality of the book and I came into this one with high expectations that I didn’t feel it quite lived up to.
PS The book scores bonus points for making me realise how completely I misread Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers which I will now have to re-read.
And, I think the author had something perfect for me in mind. In the introduction he says:
If this book works as I want it to, it’ll appeal to birder and non-birder alike. I‘d love it to be as vital a companion to ornithologists as their field guides, illuminating all the webs of meaning, of joy that birds spin out behind them: triangulating between the bird, the world and literature.
For all these reasons I opened the book full of anticipation.
Here’s the point where I acknowledge a sense of disappointment that grew in me as I read. A sense of disappointment that did gradually fade but never quite went away. Each chapter focuses on a different bird, twenty-one of them. Each chapter opens with a full-page illustration of the bird by Neil Gower, and further small illustrations are at the start and end of the text for each chapter. But it was the text that bothered me as all the chapters seemed to take the same format which consists of collecting together many, many quotes from novels and poetry that refer to each bird. That in itself would be fine. What I found didn’t work for me is the lack of anything else in the book: it seems to string together quote after quote without providing anything extra. True, each chapter starts with some kind of anecdote, but certainly a lot of the early chapters then seem to descend into multiple quotes.
It's also true that there are some chapters where the author lets his hair down and gives us an insight into himself and his relationship with birds. Hoping for another of these is what kept me going because there were some tantalising snippets that would make a fascinating pieces if they were expanded.
Towards the end of the book, I found myself slightly revising my opinion. I don’t think the basic style changed very much. But I did begin to look back over the book and think about what it had been presenting to me. And what I found myself thinking about is how different birds have come to symbolise different things in human emotion. The crow, made famous by Ted Hughes, carries the burden of darkness in our imagination. The curlew speaks of loneliness or isolation (notice whenever a TV program wants to let you know you are in the middle of nowhere you will hear a curlew call). The barn owl (or owls in general, really) seem to conjure up the spiritual world. And so it goes on.
As a long-term birdwatcher, I might be slightly over-enthusiastic about this.
So, if you want a good overview of how different birds are represented in literature, then this would be a good book for you to read. I am less convinced that it is a “vital companion to ornithologists”. Which is a shame. It probably deserves a slightly higher rating than I am giving it, but all my ratings are more about my feelings about a book than they are about the quality of the book and I came into this one with high expectations that I didn’t feel it quite lived up to.
PS The book scores bonus points for making me realise how completely I misread Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers which I will now have to re-read.
July 13, 2020
This wonderful book is a hard book to find a genre for, it fits into many.
Part a memoir of the author's interesting life as part of a literary family and associates.
Each chapter is sheltered under the wing of a particular well known European bird and there are bright gems of references to that bird in poetry and literature feathered throughout the chapter. Memories of Swifts in Paris, Waxwings in Russia, Seagulls on a Boston beach, and many encounters throughout the UK spark these musings. The chapters are accompanied by fresh colourful artwork by Neil Gower, who is also illustrating the new release covers of Bill Bryson's backlist.
A beautiful example of nature writing and literary criticism.
One I'd like to re-read but reluctantly need to return to the library.
Highly recommended to read and savour at your leisure.
Part a memoir of the author's interesting life as part of a literary family and associates.
Each chapter is sheltered under the wing of a particular well known European bird and there are bright gems of references to that bird in poetry and literature feathered throughout the chapter. Memories of Swifts in Paris, Waxwings in Russia, Seagulls on a Boston beach, and many encounters throughout the UK spark these musings. The chapters are accompanied by fresh colourful artwork by Neil Gower, who is also illustrating the new release covers of Bill Bryson's backlist.
A beautiful example of nature writing and literary criticism.
One I'd like to re-read but reluctantly need to return to the library.
Highly recommended to read and savour at your leisure.
January 23, 2021
It's a lovely idea, and a great combo: books and birds. A sort of literary-birdish concordance.
Credit is shared between the author - responsible for the text and the illustrator, responsible for the...yep, you've got it. Each bird's entry has a full-page illustration. Dare I admit that these did little for me? Sorry. They were very reminiscent of 1970s Ladybird book illustrations - which I rather enjoy in 1970s Ladybird books: I just wasn't expecting them here.
I don't think the book offers any stellar insights into either birds or birds in literature, but there were some moving pieces of writing, generally where Preston shares little moments of birdy significance from his own life. I love, for example, the image of a young boy sitting all the way through any Shakespeare he went to see with his parents, waiting for, and mentally ticking off, the birds he'd swotted up on and knew were to be mentioned. And the apparent love the author has for both birds and literature leave a mark too.
Even had I enjoyed nothing else about this book (and that's not the case) it would have been absolutely worth reading simply for the rather astonishing dialect term for a kestrel, whispered in the notes. One I've not heard before and which has left an unshakeable image in my head. I'm now on a quiet quest to identify where this dialect term is applied...Please help me if you can!
Credit is shared between the author - responsible for the text and the illustrator, responsible for the...yep, you've got it. Each bird's entry has a full-page illustration. Dare I admit that these did little for me? Sorry. They were very reminiscent of 1970s Ladybird book illustrations - which I rather enjoy in 1970s Ladybird books: I just wasn't expecting them here.
I don't think the book offers any stellar insights into either birds or birds in literature, but there were some moving pieces of writing, generally where Preston shares little moments of birdy significance from his own life. I love, for example, the image of a young boy sitting all the way through any Shakespeare he went to see with his parents, waiting for, and mentally ticking off, the birds he'd swotted up on and knew were to be mentioned. And the apparent love the author has for both birds and literature leave a mark too.
Even had I enjoyed nothing else about this book (and that's not the case) it would have been absolutely worth reading simply for the rather astonishing dialect term for a kestrel, whispered in the notes. One I've not heard before and which has left an unshakeable image in my head. I'm now on a quiet quest to identify where this dialect term is applied...Please help me if you can!
July 27, 2021
Es un libro hermoso, sentido y repleto de remembranzas; el autor trasluce su pasión por las aves en un tejido de historias, recuerdos y poemas que me ha resultado inspirador, evocador y nostálgico.
It's a beautiful book, heartfelt and full of memories; the author reveals his passion for birds intertwining stories, memories and poems that has been inspiring, evocative and nostalgic for me.
It's a beautiful book, heartfelt and full of memories; the author reveals his passion for birds intertwining stories, memories and poems that has been inspiring, evocative and nostalgic for me.
July 10, 2017
The year was 1972 and my love affair with birds and the natural world was born. I was only ten years-old but I was hooked. All these years later I still stand and watch as Goldfinches move from one thistle seed head to another. Like many others my first bird book the wonderful Observers Book of Birds which still to this day takes pride of place among the many natural history books. There is one more book to add to bookcase and that is As Kingfishers Catch Fire by Alex Preston and Neil Gower.
Words are provided by the writer and author Alex Preston and the truly wonderful plates are from the internationally acclaimed graphic artist Neil Gower and are just wonderful. The whole ethos of this book is to celebrate birds and how authors down the years have used birds to grace the pages of their own books, interspersed with this what you could say is part memoir as Alex Preston recounts his love of birds and birdwatching. Each chapter celebrates one unique bird and with a plate by Neil Gower. We have authors, writers and poets that fill this wondrous book with writings and memories, when you read each chapter and the notes provided I can only imagine the research that must have gone into this book.
Poetry and birds seem to have gone hand in hand through since we started writing poetry may be that is why since my childhood days I have loved both birds and poetry writers down the years have written about birds and incorporated them. Birds have played a part in all our lives and each of us has our own memories. Then there are the great nature writers those that fill my bookcase and from time to time I sit and lose myself in some of the most outstanding writings. For Alex Preston his love of birdwatching had to be hidden away when he was fifteen due to his peers and he spent his time reading books on birds that kept his love of birdwatching alive so that all these years later he pours his heart out through his writing and those writers and authors and poets that brings our love of birds to pages. As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a book that celebrates birds in writing and poetry and personal memories. A book to love now and in the years to come. A celebration of our feathered friends whether that is the gardeners friend the Robin or the haunting sight ghostly sight of a Barn Owl hunting at dusk. This is a book to be loved and cherished and so beautifully illustrated. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
My copy was provided by Corsair for review.
208 Pages.
Words are provided by the writer and author Alex Preston and the truly wonderful plates are from the internationally acclaimed graphic artist Neil Gower and are just wonderful. The whole ethos of this book is to celebrate birds and how authors down the years have used birds to grace the pages of their own books, interspersed with this what you could say is part memoir as Alex Preston recounts his love of birds and birdwatching. Each chapter celebrates one unique bird and with a plate by Neil Gower. We have authors, writers and poets that fill this wondrous book with writings and memories, when you read each chapter and the notes provided I can only imagine the research that must have gone into this book.
Poetry and birds seem to have gone hand in hand through since we started writing poetry may be that is why since my childhood days I have loved both birds and poetry writers down the years have written about birds and incorporated them. Birds have played a part in all our lives and each of us has our own memories. Then there are the great nature writers those that fill my bookcase and from time to time I sit and lose myself in some of the most outstanding writings. For Alex Preston his love of birdwatching had to be hidden away when he was fifteen due to his peers and he spent his time reading books on birds that kept his love of birdwatching alive so that all these years later he pours his heart out through his writing and those writers and authors and poets that brings our love of birds to pages. As Kingfishers Catch Fire is a book that celebrates birds in writing and poetry and personal memories. A book to love now and in the years to come. A celebration of our feathered friends whether that is the gardeners friend the Robin or the haunting sight ghostly sight of a Barn Owl hunting at dusk. This is a book to be loved and cherished and so beautifully illustrated. HIGHLY RECOMMENDED.
My copy was provided by Corsair for review.
208 Pages.
February 13, 2024
A typical bird guide comprises, very largely, a series of objective descriptions of its subject: size, colour, voice, taxonomic classification, and so on, with illustrations whose primary aim is to help assign individual birds to their species.
This beautiful book is the antithesis of such things. It provides the highly subjective descriptions of a selection of twenty-one bird species, many common and some less so, but all familiar to most British birdwatchers, that are found in poetry and literary prose.
When young, the author was a keen birder. As a teenager, he put that identity aside but ‘never stopped seeing birds and hearing them. I began to hunt for them when pursuing the great love that replaced birdwatching for me: books. … I filled notebooks with poems and snippets of ornithological fiction or nature writing. Where once I had loved seeing the birds of my bird books in the open air, I now drew happiness from encountering birds I’d known in the wild ensconced on the page.’ He looks for ‘what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “instress” — when a writer manages to capture the “inscape” of a bird, the disparate elements that make each creature identifiably unique’. The book is drawn from his notebooks, and attempts to express the essence of each bird as encountered in the wild. For example, writing about listening to a nightingale, and to its silent pauses, and remembering ‘what Wallace Stevens calls the “yellow moon of words about this nightingale/ In measureless measures.”, he finds these words bring a richer complexity to the song, ‘acting as this book should, if I’ve got it even half-right’. I think Preston succeeds very well – he certainly quotes a remarkable variety of writers, each with their own experience of the birds to express in their idiosyncratic ways.
Besides what is said about the birds, there is also a good deal of biographical material about the authors quoted here, especially Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, and about Preston himself, that is a useful addition, placing their observations of birds in an emotional context. The end-notes (referenced by superscript numbers in text) are another useful component. They show the source of quoted material and much else, including the origin of the title in a poem by Hopkins.
The illustrations by Neil Gower are a valuable complement to the text. Each subject has a full-page colour portrait beautifully illustrating some aspect of the bird’s behaviour; there are also monochrome vignettes, the end-papers are printed with a stylised kingfisher design that reminds me of work by Maurits Escher, and the cover shows a highly magnified portion of a kingfisher’s wing, in blue, turquoise, yellow and orange. Overall, the production of the book is of very high quality, entirely appropriate to its subject.
As well as being a delight in its own right, this book has encouraged me to read further in the literature that it references, especially such things as Grey’s ‘The Charm of Birds’. It could be a thoughtful gift for a thoughtful birdwatcher.
This beautiful book is the antithesis of such things. It provides the highly subjective descriptions of a selection of twenty-one bird species, many common and some less so, but all familiar to most British birdwatchers, that are found in poetry and literary prose.
When young, the author was a keen birder. As a teenager, he put that identity aside but ‘never stopped seeing birds and hearing them. I began to hunt for them when pursuing the great love that replaced birdwatching for me: books. … I filled notebooks with poems and snippets of ornithological fiction or nature writing. Where once I had loved seeing the birds of my bird books in the open air, I now drew happiness from encountering birds I’d known in the wild ensconced on the page.’ He looks for ‘what Gerard Manley Hopkins called “instress” — when a writer manages to capture the “inscape” of a bird, the disparate elements that make each creature identifiably unique’. The book is drawn from his notebooks, and attempts to express the essence of each bird as encountered in the wild. For example, writing about listening to a nightingale, and to its silent pauses, and remembering ‘what Wallace Stevens calls the “yellow moon of words about this nightingale/ In measureless measures.”, he finds these words bring a richer complexity to the song, ‘acting as this book should, if I’ve got it even half-right’. I think Preston succeeds very well – he certainly quotes a remarkable variety of writers, each with their own experience of the birds to express in their idiosyncratic ways.
Besides what is said about the birds, there is also a good deal of biographical material about the authors quoted here, especially Edward Grey, Viscount Grey of Fallodon, and about Preston himself, that is a useful addition, placing their observations of birds in an emotional context. The end-notes (referenced by superscript numbers in text) are another useful component. They show the source of quoted material and much else, including the origin of the title in a poem by Hopkins.
The illustrations by Neil Gower are a valuable complement to the text. Each subject has a full-page colour portrait beautifully illustrating some aspect of the bird’s behaviour; there are also monochrome vignettes, the end-papers are printed with a stylised kingfisher design that reminds me of work by Maurits Escher, and the cover shows a highly magnified portion of a kingfisher’s wing, in blue, turquoise, yellow and orange. Overall, the production of the book is of very high quality, entirely appropriate to its subject.
As well as being a delight in its own right, this book has encouraged me to read further in the literature that it references, especially such things as Grey’s ‘The Charm of Birds’. It could be a thoughtful gift for a thoughtful birdwatcher.
June 8, 2023
5 blue stars.
A bit of a hodgepodge of thoughts and memories inspired by British birds, interspersed with quotations showing how these birds have appeared in prose and poetry. This will invite dipping into again and again. Delightful for anyone who loves birds and books, and it makes me want to seek out some of these works to read in their entirety, and/or to start my own notebook of quotations about birds.
Description: When Alex Preston was 15, he stopped being a birdwatcher. Adolescence and the scorn of his peers made him put away his binoculars, leave behind the hides and the nature reserves and the quiet companionship of his fellow birders. His love of birds didn't disappear though. Rather, it went underground, and he began birdwatching in the books that he read, creating his own personal anthology of nature writing that brought the birds of his childhood back to brilliant life. Looking for moments 'when heart and bird are one', Preston weaves the very best writing about birds into a personal and eccentric narrative that is as much about the joy of reading and writing as it is about the thrill of wildlife. Moving from the 'high requiem' of Keats's nightingale to the crow-strewn sky at the end of Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, from Ted Hughes's brooding 'Hawk in the Rain' to the giddy anthropomorphism of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, this is a book that will make you look at birds, at the world, in a newer, richer light. Beautifully illustrated and illuminated by the celebrated graphic artist Neil Gower.
A bit of a hodgepodge of thoughts and memories inspired by British birds, interspersed with quotations showing how these birds have appeared in prose and poetry. This will invite dipping into again and again. Delightful for anyone who loves birds and books, and it makes me want to seek out some of these works to read in their entirety, and/or to start my own notebook of quotations about birds.
Description: When Alex Preston was 15, he stopped being a birdwatcher. Adolescence and the scorn of his peers made him put away his binoculars, leave behind the hides and the nature reserves and the quiet companionship of his fellow birders. His love of birds didn't disappear though. Rather, it went underground, and he began birdwatching in the books that he read, creating his own personal anthology of nature writing that brought the birds of his childhood back to brilliant life. Looking for moments 'when heart and bird are one', Preston weaves the very best writing about birds into a personal and eccentric narrative that is as much about the joy of reading and writing as it is about the thrill of wildlife. Moving from the 'high requiem' of Keats's nightingale to the crow-strewn sky at the end of Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, from Ted Hughes's brooding 'Hawk in the Rain' to the giddy anthropomorphism of Jonathan Livingstone Seagull, this is a book that will make you look at birds, at the world, in a newer, richer light. Beautifully illustrated and illuminated by the celebrated graphic artist Neil Gower.
June 22, 2021
I fell in love with this book at first sight. It was on a display shelf at Shakespeare and Co in Paris--signed.... and the physical book, with its gorgeous illustration, so beautifully published , totally bowled me over. Dragging it home, it has sat on my bedside table ever since. I love reading it in snippets. Books and Birds.... Birds in novels and in poetry.... a lot of art is mentioned as well.
Below is from the review in the Guardian by Blake Morrison
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
"Further back in the family tree, there’s Edward Grey, Britain’s longest-serving foreign secretary, famous for saying (in 1914): “The lights are going out all over Europe”, and less well-known as the author of a book (a model for this one) called The Charm of Birds. There are fascinating glimpses into Grey’s marriage (probably unconsummated), and his friendship with Henry Newbolt. But it’s always to birds that Preston returns.
His book is less a polemic on conservation than a plea for close looking and close listening. He believes, with Gerard Manley Hopkins (from whom he takes his title), that the world is charged with grandeur – the world of birds especially – and that our lives are the richer when we attend to that grandeur. “What thou art we know not,” Shelley tells his skylark, but some of the greatest poems in the language have come from the effort to find out."
Below is from the review in the Guardian by Blake Morrison
https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
"Further back in the family tree, there’s Edward Grey, Britain’s longest-serving foreign secretary, famous for saying (in 1914): “The lights are going out all over Europe”, and less well-known as the author of a book (a model for this one) called The Charm of Birds. There are fascinating glimpses into Grey’s marriage (probably unconsummated), and his friendship with Henry Newbolt. But it’s always to birds that Preston returns.
His book is less a polemic on conservation than a plea for close looking and close listening. He believes, with Gerard Manley Hopkins (from whom he takes his title), that the world is charged with grandeur – the world of birds especially – and that our lives are the richer when we attend to that grandeur. “What thou art we know not,” Shelley tells his skylark, but some of the greatest poems in the language have come from the effort to find out."
February 9, 2019
I should have liked this book (Birds!) but I just didn’t. The book, however, is 5-star beautiful and the illustrations by Gower are incredible (the waxwings are worth the price of the book). The writing seemed almost like bragging at times (look at all this smart literature I read!) and there was hardly any story here just a mish-mash of passages that I was assumed to know what was going on. Even the author’s descriptions of the passages, so that the reader might have some context, were really confusing and did not illuminate the writing like I hoped it would. Surprisingly the best chapter was on Gulls because I felt like there was an actual, graspable theme that wove itself through the chapter. There were some gems here, not all was lost, but they are sort of lost in an odd sea. Anyway, this is a mostly confusing book that made me feel dumb, but it is pretty, so...
August 19, 2017
There ought to be more books like this. It's beautifully designed, a compelling mix of genres and suffused with care and attention. Each chapter takes a specific bird and mixes autobiography, literary criticism and bird biography - essentially, rather like listening to a fascinating lecture - and gives you the story of both the bird as a piece of nature and the bird as cultural metaphor. The writing is clear and compelling and the presentation is stellar - from the endpapers to the bespoke paintings of birds that introduce each chapter - the book is physically a really great artefact.
March 16, 2019
A beautifully illustrated curate's egg of semi-academic essay and personal anecdote.
The memoir, as other readers have said, is the more compelling element. When the author metaphorically 'loosens his tie' it becomes infinitely more absorbing. I could have happily heard more tales of the eccentric relative in France and an extension to the lovely portrait of his father in the collared dove chapter. As it is, the poetry, and some of the author's own adjectives and verbs, don't always make for comfortable comprehension for the casual reader.
The memoir, as other readers have said, is the more compelling element. When the author metaphorically 'loosens his tie' it becomes infinitely more absorbing. I could have happily heard more tales of the eccentric relative in France and an extension to the lovely portrait of his father in the collared dove chapter. As it is, the poetry, and some of the author's own adjectives and verbs, don't always make for comfortable comprehension for the casual reader.
January 12, 2018
It's a lovely book, but could have done with better proof-reading, there are some typos e.g. 'mare's tales' for 'mares' tails' (clouds). It's one to dip into rather than read straight through, and in the end I skipped the birds we don't have in New Zealand. He mentioned many books I've read, some I'll now definitely re-read e.g. Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series. Probably not for you if you don't like poetry.
September 27, 2019
A beautiful and interesting book that I have read over a long period of time and will go back to in the future. I think it’s the sort of book I needed to read slowly and am looking forward to reading it again to get the most out of it and cover bits I didn’t take in fully the first time. It has highlighted lots of new literature that I am keen to read and was a joy to read. And the illustrations are wonderful.
September 2, 2018
This was a beautiful book with Neil Gower's illustrations, and a skilled and satisfying work of design -fighting back against the eReader! As so often, the birder is academically a non-scientist, English literature specialist and here there is an explicit intention to bring literature into the book. That works well as one of the rich strands alongside ornithology and memoir.
May 6, 2019
I read this book intentionally slowly. No more than one chapter, one bird, a day. And a day when I was at home alone. Because I read it out loud. It was a treat to myself, a wonderful experience, and I shall read it again.
August 13, 2017
A beautiful, beautiful book. Beautiful words, beautiful paintings. It's what books are for.
December 7, 2017
Beautiful illustrations
December 19, 2017
A bird lovers’ delight. Beautiful drawings. Fascinating excerpts of poetry and prose by various authors and a memoir through encounters with birds. Well written. A book to return to.
February 2, 2023
Good book
Want to read
August 30, 2018Feather and fascicle - Yes, please!
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