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My most recent collection, A Whistling of Birds, is published by Nine Arches in the UK and Human & Rousseau in South Africa. Both editions include a selection of Douglas Robertson’s beautiful nature illustrations. You can read the UK press release, watch the online triple-poet launch, or see reviews on the Collections page, featuring previous books too. ‘The Woburn Robin’ and other short videos of readings can be found on the Nine Arches YouTube channel.

Poems from the collection were originally published in journals including Harvard Review, The Hudson Review, The Island Review, Confluence, Anthropocene, The Florentine, Finished Creatures, New Statesman, Bad Lilies, Under the Radar, Magma, Poetry Ireland Review and the Places of Poetry anthology (Oneworld), edited by Paul Farley and Andrew McRae.

A Whistling of Birds: a review by Dirk Klopper on LitNet
’The interweaving of the images of spoor, spider web and birdsong, the spirits of literary predecessors inhabiting the lexis and syntax of the poem, and the reaching across continents to form a thing of beauty out of the recursive furies and displacements of our lives, make the book an astonishing achievement. The illustrations by Douglas Robertson are apt and exquisite – the tirricks in flight along the top margin of the cover, the dung beetle, the lilting skyline and globe of the earth, the whale cradling the planet as it migrates in southern oceans, and the strip of savannah landscape snaking across four blank pages. The book is a gift.’

A Whistling of Birds is deeply concerned with nature and the paths we track through our environment. It draws inspiration from several poets and artists, but is at times in dialogue (and debate) with D.H. Lawrence’s 1923 collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Douglas Robertson’s illustrations arose from our long-running correspondence around the birds and the ‘beasties’ and Lawrence’s nature writing. Following on from the 2023 publication of A Whistling of Birds – in the centenary year for Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers – Doug and I have held workshops and on-stage conversations, and some of my readings have been accompanied by exhibitions of his carvings, assemblages and drawings. But the poems and artworks also stand on their own too.

Best Books of 2023: Rebecca Foster, ‘Bookish Beck’ blog
'I was drawn to A Whistling of Birds for its acknowledged debt to D.H. Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers. Snakes, bees, bats and foxes are some of the creatures that scamper through the text. There are poems for marine life, fruit and wildflowers. You get a sense of the seasons turning, and the natural wonders to prize from each. … A real gem.’

Past Collections
My fourth collection Bearings was published by Nine Arches Press (UK) and Modjaji Books (South Africa) in 2016. In the same year Edinburgh publisher Mariscat launched The Leonids, a pamphlet of poems mostly about my mother, Ann Dixon, who died in 2015. The Herald Scotland chose 'My Mother's Dress' (part of 'Notes Towards Nasturtiums') as Poem of the Day. Copies can be ordered from Mariscat, or if you want a signed copy, contact me. See more on my earlier books, Weather Eye, A Fold in the Map and The Tempest Prognosticator on the Collections page as well.

On the Poetry Archive, you can hear me reading ‘Plenty’, a poem about water and the lack of it, for my mother and scattered sisters. ‘Plenty’, from my earlier collection, A Fold in the Map, has been included in the iGCSE English syllabus.

Future Publications
Nine Arches will publish my new collection The Landing, about my mother, including some of the poems from The Leonids, 2027. The title poem ‘The Landing’ appeared in the New Statesman in July 2019, 50 years after the first manned moon landing.

All future events will be confirmed on my Readings & Events page.

Odd Musings
You can read the occasional journal piece and news of poem publications on the Toktokkie page on this site. A toktokkie is a South African beetle, named for the tapping sounds it makes. Some of my taps here are about D.H. Lawrence and A Whistling of Birds. ‘Karoo Rain’, is about drought and rain in my home town in the semi-arid Karoo region of South Africa — though much rain and sunshine has come and gone since then ...

If you have a professional query about your own writing please contact me or one of my excellent colleagues via the Blake Friedmann Literary Agency website. Please take a careful look at the submission guidelines.

 The author photograph on this page is by Jo Kearney | jokearneyphotography.com