Aviary of Small Birds by Karen McCarthy Woolf Michael Longley Harriet Truscott

Harriet Truscott

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

but also connected

hunting dogs caught permanently suspended in the chase and a car that veers from the road into the floodwater in which the whole collection is saturated

Each anthology in the Staying Alive trilogy has 500 poems to touch the heart

Aviary of Small Birds by Karen McCarthy Woolf Michael Longley Harriet TruscottAn 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