lo and behold,
The sky was full of cochons.
As they soared and swerved and swooped,
Exactly by what means I could not discern.
That was many years ago. I am an old man now,
And the sight's so familiar
That I am told people don't look up now as they once did...

        from 'The Day that Pigs Learned to Fly'

   John Heath-Stubbs' new collection is wise, wry and unexpected. In his eighty-sixth year, the poet commands his medium with a virtuoso's easy lightness of touch, returning to lifelong preoccupations with a fresh and intimate attention. His responsiveness to the natural world, to birds in particular, is deepened by a lifetime's observation and listening, and invigorated by delight in nature's unfailing newness. Genial and tolerant, this collection mixes an inevitable nostalgia with light-heartedness; satirical squibs are balanced by moments of elegiac beauty. The grace of the moment is highlighted by an awareness of the continuities of natural and human history. C.H. Sisson called Heath-Stubbs 'a Johnsonian presence with a Miltonic disability' (a reference to the poet's blindness); like Johnson in his later years, Heath-Stubbs' learned urbanity is enormously generous and beguilingly gruff.

Table of Contents

The Day that Pigs Learned to Fly

Cat and Dog

A Mnemonic

Penge - Moral Standards Vindicated

The Tadpoles

Poem Intended to be Inscribed on a Manhole Cover in a London Pavement

Pollen

Cephalopods

Fitzroy

Madame Butterfly

The Tuatera Speaks

Gadarenes

Migrants

Cat Talk

The Frog and the Scorpion

Homage to Edgar Rice Burroughs

Brock

An Oxford Tortoise

The Duckatrice of Netley Abbey

I Am a Roman

Carême and the Marquis de Cussy

Chelone

The Clock Stopped

Mushroom Universities

Omar Khayyam

The World's My Oyster

The Pompadour Chatterer

An Ibis at Blackpool

A Tufted Duck

The Nightingale's Ode to John Keats

On Christmas Day

Poem for Easter

St Godric of Finchale (1069-1170)

A Bit of a Tall Order

Pandora's Box

Devizes

In the Porcelain Factory

Edward Fitzgerald meets Mother Goose and Both Become

Politically Committed

Old Mother Hubbard

Little Miss Muffet

Tom, Tom the Piper's Son

Little Bo Peep

The Queen of Hearts

Jack Sprat and his Wife

Baa Baa Black Sheep

Pussy's in the Well

Little Jack Horner