Birds Knit My Ribs Together

By Phil Barnett

what if / I actually – am – a bird / my cupped hands / opening to release me... Phil Barnett's relationship with birds is so close that his poetry blurs the distinctions between himself and the birds - a kind of ornimorphology where rather than giving the birds human characteristics, the reverse happens, and he imagines himself as a bird. Phil Barnett is a photographer, writer, musician, artist and naturalist, who has a passion for the birds that kept him company through a long hard illness. His photography and poetry have quite a following on social media, which is where we found him, on The Daily Haiku. His skill as a photographer leads to an acute visual sensibility, and his slow recovery moves from a tick sheet his mother had to fill in for him, to extraordinary poetry - full of wit and wonder and spectacular language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Arachne Press
• Release date: Jan 25, 2024
• ISBN: 9781913665920

Phil Barnett

A decade long stretch of illness largely confined Phil Barnett to a living room. His patch was the view through the window. He had swapped the people, job, relationships and fully working body of his previous life, for a garden full of birds. It was made bearable by his fascination with all things avian. It would be only a slight exaggeration to say that he spent 10 years looking out of a window. He recorded and documented everything, producing a website. Although still affected by illness Phils daily walks take him around an area of fairly ordinary countryside in South Lancashire, producing both poetry and photography that is anything but ordinary.

Book preview

The Pond

by the pond in always falling daylight

misted moon-smitten blue

all the animals came and went

and all the ghosts

glancing through curves

through bent branches of night-heavy alder

things that were neither

everything went to that watering place

there were false alarms, many of them

a flock of birds on the in breath

a lost decade on the out

dipping down to sip

the last end-of-summer swallow

just skimming the surface

of a stillborn dawn

then at last a song thrush sang

it’s day, it’s day

and because this time I sang along

   it was day

Dream Thrush

back then there were only wild words

mostly wordless, free of meaning

grounded air, a ripple’s seeing-through-to

an omen-thrush, a new dawn-thrush

winter’s tale breast, yarn of flank

a story-thrush, an idea of