The Poetry of Birds: edited by Simon Armitage and Tim Dee

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If poems are like birds' nests, shelters from the storm pieced together from odds and ends, what is a poetry anthology but a nest of nests? Poets have ­always been birdwatchers, to varying degrees of expertness: Coleridge's nightingale, in Lyrical Ballads, is the first record of that species in Somerset, and John Clare provided 65 first descriptions of the birds of Northamptonshire. A contemporary twitcher-poet such as Peter Reading frequently apostrophises his Zeiss binoculars, and Helen Macdonald is an avian researcher and falconer.

Collection at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. Folio from an illustrated Persian manuscript dated c.1600. Paintings by Habiballah of Sava (active ca. 1590–1610), in ink, opaque watercolor, gold, and silver on paper, dimensions 25,4 x 11,4cm. [7] Valley of Detachment, where all desires and attachments to the world are given up. Here, what is assumed to be “reality” vanishes. Warren's handling of medieval material in a way that reminds us of both the innate value of the species we run the risk of destroying and the dangers of human exceptionalism is a welcome and, moreover, a significant contribution to the field."Birds are everywhere in poetry, so compiling this list of ten of the greatest bird poems has involved leaving many great poems out. However, we hope that the selection below will suggest the wondrous variety to be found among English-language poets and their descriptions of birds. What’s your favourite bird poem? In modern poetry, birds have been just as visible – and not simply as ornament. Ted Hughes found in birds the symbols of his own concerns, first in the shining, terrible, power of The Hawk in the Rain whose "wings hold all creation in a weightless quiet" and later going as far as to forge his own gospel story in Crow.

Masani, R. P. (tr.) (2001), Conference of the Birds: A Seeker's Journey to God, Weiser Books, ISBN 1609252233 .Persian text of The Conference of Birds, with recitation in Persian by members of the Chamekhan Group.