Sparrow Tree
Gwyneth Lewis's highly inventive Sparrow Tree puts nature writing in a spin, presenting a huge variety of birds, both British and American: blue tits, blackbirds, egrets, juncos, starlings, herons and hummingbirds as well as the sparrows of the title. The book explores birds as mouthpieces for inhuman song and the wild inside the mind.
Launching flights of avian fancy or fantasy on several levels, Sparrow Tree moves from birdsong as proto-language to birds as decorative beings. The collection includes her already well-known How to Knit a Poem, commissioned by BBC Radio 4, and ends with images of the human word as a form of love.
Praise for Sparrow Tree
"Since winning the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival Prize in 1995, Gwyneth Lewis (Wales's first National Poet) has steadily gained recognition from critics as one of the most gifted writers of her generation... These poems work especially well if read aloud, when the lovely half-rhymes and alliteration are fully audible... The impression is of someone deeply involved in the process of making."
Poetry Review
"[an] impressive, restrained collection....The most lyrical writing is to be found in "Birder" (an elegy for an aunt), packed with metaphor and a rigorous, energetic music that once more addresses "the end" - "When I die / I want to hear birds ricochet/ Outside my window... I'd like/ To deserve this litany:/ Woodpecker, waxwing, chickadee."
The Guardian
"Gwyneth Lewis is my favourite modern poet... It is a privilege to have this new slim volume of poems in my hands... Sparrow Tree did not disappoint. I found the poems... colourful, poignant, funny and thought provoking... Every poem has characters who come alive with Gwyneth's gifted use of words... I recommend this book to all readers who love poetry and to those who don't - I would say, just try it - and see for yourself how beautifully written and accessible Gwyneth Lewis's poetry is."
"Gwyneth Lewis's previous collection A Hospital Odyssey was received well by critics, and this latest collection should be no different. Sparrow Tree presents poetry ostensibly about the huge variety of birds native to both the UK and America, but on delving deeper into the natural imagery the reader is presented with the wilds of the human mind as habitat for these birds, and the birds themselves as mouthpieces for human emotion... Wales's erstwhile National Poet has much to offer - as Elaine Feinstein puts it in the Guardian: "Such exuberant invention... The range of reference is so wide, we are intoxicated by it.". "
New Books
"With their inventive internal rhymes and sprawling register, the both lilt and syncopate. But music is clearly different from song - the one played, the other voiced - and it is this distinction from which the poems in Sparrow Tree seem to rise ... These are poems that gather darkly and peck. They feint and play hazardously with their beaks and sometimes take to wing.... These are poems more concerned with the mechanisms of song - both human and avian - than they are with the song itself, and it is this resistance that makes the poems so often mesmerizing... What Lewis pulls off... feels like an avian feat: she strikes a fine, improbable balance between gravity and levity. Even as her speaker struggles to access the language, to get the voice right, she gets us off the ground and ungiddily bids us, look."
New Welsh Review
"The subjects she treats in this affecting volume are those of pastoral elegy... Et in Arcadia ego. Yet tone is light and vital... Cryptic and quipping equivocators, the birds that call through these poems are as enigmatic as they are emblematic. You will not find them in the trees outside your window Lewis’s birds explode in and out of the eye. They invade grammar and meaning with their calls."
Planet