Aviary of Small Birds by Karen McCarthy Woolf Michael Longley these poems are also full

these poems are also full of empathy and suffused with a quietly persistent faith

non-white body as both vulnerable ('flesh') and weaponised ('flèche')

the runaway

Harriet Truscott

Aviary of Small Birds by Karen McCarthy Woolf Michael Longley these poems are also fullAn Aviary of Small Birds is both elegy to a stillborn son and testament to the redemptive qualities of poetry as a transformative art. The book opens at the birth, which paradoxically becomes the moment of death when, after a long labour and an emergency caesarean, the baby's heart gives out. For the mother, her body flooded with endorphins, euphoria gives way to shock, followed by an intense and visceral grief. However, just as grief itself is not