Zi Zi Taah Taah Taah

Zi-zi Taah Taah Taah

The Gypsy and the Poet

Beginning with the real-life encounter between the poet John Clare and a Gypsy named Wisdom Smith, David Morley reinvigorates the sonnet sequence to stage the fellowship that develops between the two men. We see the Gypsy and the poet banter, argue and teach each other lessons; work, love, and lose what they have loved. The central section of the book enacts Clare's own belief in the creative forms of nature itself: I found the poems in the fields / And only wrote them down'.Here are two outsiders working at poetry from the underside of nature, Clare now in a brown huff', Wisdom snaring a warren with a snigger of wires'. Using a mixture of sonnets, Romani language, concrete poetry, and the dynamics of birdsong, Morley conjures a marvellous sense of nature as intimacy, something precise yet loaded and of immense importance to us.--George Szirtes

Handbook of Western Palearctic Birds, Volume 2

The second volume in this incredible series on western palearctic birds. This unique and spectacular handbook is the most complete and comprehensive photographic guide to the passerines of the Western Palearctic. Written by two of the world's most respected ornithologists, Hadoram Shirihai and Lars Svensson, it contains the most up-to-date information available on bird identification covering all aspects of plumage, moult, ageing and sexing, with sections on voice and other identification criteria, and detailed taxonomic notes. This second volume covers flycatchers, reedlings, tits, nuthatches, orioles and sunbirds, shrikes, corvids, finches and buntings, along with vagrants. The exceptional text is backed up by a remarkable collection of more than 2,500 photographs in this volume alone, featuring a comprehensive range of plumages that illustrate every race and morph of each species in the region. This stunning handbook will be the definitive reference for the region for years to come - no birder's shelf will be complete without it.