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Allen Fisher’s BIRDS
The writer has not been homeless for more than ten years, but in a
situation of living an ‘in transit’ existence between a potential home and a
room in a college orchard, in and surrounded by a culture that has almost died
from its own self-congratulation, its own internet support for a mixture of the
mediocre and nonsense, its own contribution to rubbish. Proposals, a sequence
of 35 emblems each comprised of a poem, an image and a commentary, started in
this climate and burn-out. BIRDS brings together 10 poems from Proposals. The
subjects move from burning and wasted energy to the desolation of an environment
in Crewe, the 150-year-old railway town, and the routes from there to London,
Manchester, Stafford, Birmingham, Glasgow and Cardiff. In particular the routes
through rubbish tips, wasted landscapes and wealthy estates. BIRDS, extracted
from Proposals, lifts from this melancholy of existence and its partner
mourning, for an unrecoverable and false celebration towards a set of modest
and local observations. Birds is a troubled text, fragmenting parts of a longer
sequence, belonging in language to itself rather than the larger complexity.
Birds works as a falling board.
17
Orchard ablaze with daffodils
a mistle thrush signals a sky
sprayed with hundreds of starlings
moving in a changing cloud formation
until a swan opens his wings in my head
and I take a deep breath
my chest fills with the sound of
a flyer as it pulls out to London
smacked dead on the rails
a tawny white-spotted owl
BIRDS is published by Oystercatcher Press.
ISBN: 978-1-905885-16-9
Cheques for £4 (inc UK
postage) made out to P.Hughes
4 Coastguard Cottages, Old
Hunstanton, Norfolk PE36 6EL