Aviary of Small Birds by Karen McCarthy Woolf Michael Longley the runaway

the runaway

Her poems move

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

but also connected

Aviary of Small Birds by Karen McCarthy Woolf Michael Longley the runawayAn 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