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

Harriet Truscott

but also connected

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

Her poems move

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