THE GO-AWAY BIRD: Poems by Seni Seneviratne
Peepal Tree Press, £9.99

MANY poets — and revolutionaries too, from Shelley to Rosenberg to the Palestinian laureate, Mahmoud Darwish — have invoked images of birds as freedom flyers and refugees from the human world on the ground of injustice and stranglehold. But few, like John Clare with his feathery wordplay and simple brilliance, have used their empathy to become the very birds they describe.

The Leeds-born poet of mixed Sri Lankan and English heritage, Seni Seneviratne, does exactly this in her collection The Go-Away Bird. 

Writing on the borderlands of poetry and prose, she remembers her childhood family pleasures of “picking” a chicken at meal times, her grandma’s caged pet budgerigars, who she would prefer to be rather than carrying the coal scuttle down to a “fearful” cellar, or her sensations “as a little brown girl, nose pressed up to the glass/ watching little brown birds roll around in the dust.”

The lucid lyricism of her language takes flight with her birds. Beneath their wings she recognises “The world’s a rough ride/ however high you fly,” and while she flies with “the blackest birds I can find/ though buffeted and windswept/ I can look down to see how the land lies.”

She remembers her walks to school and how she imagined she could discard her heavy satchel, lifting off above her road’s semi-detached houses “to meet a multitude of starlings” with “only the whoosh of my wings like a great black cape/ the calls of my fellow travellers weaving in and out.”

Yet these poems are anything but escapism: the revelation is how clearly you can observe the world below while you fly as a bird. Then in the poem Winter Solstice she sees a dead relative; a buzzard killed by a wire fence, its “lifeless claw clutching the wire... what ritual will suffice to cleanse this place?” 

And you think of Gaza: its blitzed people, its blighted birds.

In the poem Distractions she is in a cafe biting into a blueberry sponge, a diversion from “a life of necessary solitude.” She notices another woman, whose “plumage” she has been watching and who is casting glances at her. Two birds they are, and she thinks towards the other: “What’s to lose? Take off the jacket and fly!”

In their very own avian/human way, these poems are pointedly a call to action, to transform ourselves and the world around us, as well as soar above and understand it.