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My new collection, A Whistling of Birds, is out in the UK (Nine Arches) and in South Africa (Human & Rousseau). Both editions feature a selection of Douglas Robertson’s beautiful nature illustrations. For more information you can read the UK press release or watch the online triple-poet launch. You can watch my reading of ‘The Woburn Robin’ and other short poem videos on the Nine Arches YouTube channel too. More gallery photos to follow!

I’m looking forward to the following forthcoming readings: Magdalene Poetry Society (Saturday 11 May, reading in person at Magdalene College, Cambridge at 8pm BST, Cripps Court, Magdalene College, 1-3 Chesterton Road, CB4 3AD), and Poetry Lit (Friday 12 July on Zoom at 7pm BST). Earlier this year it was a great pleasure to read at St Mungo’s Mirrorball at the CCA in Glasgow and at the launch of Virgula by Sasja Janssen at the Music Room in Great Ormond Street, London. I also enjoyed talking to the UK’s D.H. Lawrence Society, focusing on Lawrence’s travels, his ‘savage pilgrimage’ and nature poetry from that time. I also read some of my poems from A Whistling of Birds which are inked to Lawrence and his iconic collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers. You can watch the video of the Zoom talk here. See more details on my Readings & Events page.

In late 2024 and early 2025 there is exciting poetry and exhibition news for A Whistling of Birds – to be confirmed in due course!

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.’

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.’

You can order the Nine Arches edition and the South African edition from Human & Rousseau now and can see some of Doug’s images on the Birds, Beasts and Flowers page here. Doug’s gorgeous drawing of the Il Porcellino statue in Florence can be seen here in The Florentine, along with the companion poem, ‘My Sweet Fiorenza’ and some context about the writing of the poem.

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 with D.H. Lawrence’s 1923 collection Birds, Beasts and Flowers — and I’m thrilled that 12 of Douglas Robertson’s beautiful drawings are included in the UK edition, the result of a long-running to-and-fro conversation around the birds and the ‘beasties’ and Lawrence’s nature writing. Following on from the 2023 centenary year for Lawrence’s Birds, Beasts and Flowers, I’ll be doing readings and conversations with Doug along with a wider exhibition featuring carvings and assemblages, alongside the drawings from the collection, and more. Watch this space!

Several poems from the collection have been published in international 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. In 2024 I have new work forthcoming in Hog River Press, Poetry London and other publications.

Here are a few recent poem publications from A Whistling of Birds:

‘Bede’s Sparrow’, New Statesman
18.5.22

‘Self-Portrait in Sweet Woodruff’, Herbology News
1.5.22

’Sweet Violet’, Bad Lilies, Issue 5
December 2021

You can read the occasional journal piece and news about new 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 Graaff-Reinet, in the semi-arid Karoo region of South Africa — though rain has fallen and coronavirus has come since then ...

Past Collections
My fourth collection Bearings was published by Nine Arches Press in the UK and Modjaji Books in South Africa in 2016.
The same year, Edinburgh publisher Mariscat launched The Leonids, a pamphlet of poems mostly about that force of nature, 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 and The Scotsman published 'binding' from the pamphlet. You can read '9 a.m', a poem from the collection, on Aerodrome here. Copies can be ordered from Mariscat, or if you want a signed copy, contact me.

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, in September 2026. Here is the title poem ‘The Landing’ as it appeared in the New Statesman in July 2019, 50 years after the first manned moon landing.

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