Margaret Atwood wrote a very interesting article about birds in Saturday’s Guardian. Interesting but also alarming. It is full of  scary statistics and facts.

Here are a few statistics. In the United States, power lines kill 130 to 174 million birds a year – many of them raptors such as hawks, or waterfowl, whose large wingspans can touch two hot wires at a time, resulting in electrocution, or who smash into the thin power lines without seeing them (think piano wire). Cars and trucks collide with and kill between 60 and 80 million annually in the US, and tall buildings – especially those that leave their lights on all night – are a major hazard for migrating birds, leading to between a hundred million and a billion bird deaths annually. Add in lighted communication towers, which also kill large numbers of bats, and can account for as many as 30,000 bird deaths each on a bad night – thus 40 to 50 million deaths a year, and due to double as more towers are built. Agricultural pesticides directly kill 67 million birds per year, with many more deaths resulting from accumulated toxins that converge at the top of the food chain, and from starvation as the usual food of insectivores disappears. Cats polish off approximately 39 million birds in the state of Wisconsin alone; multiply that by the number of states in America, and then do the calculations for the rest of the world: the numbers are astronomical.

Here is a link. I touch on this in my latest letter to Miriam…more on that soon.

On Christmas day, I unwrapped a parcel from Karen. Inside was a beautiful blue bird card and a handmade canvas bag decorated with a lino print of a first class stamp:

The bag was a perfect gift, not just because it relates to our letter-writing, but because on December 31st, I boarded a one-way (for now) flight to Geneva, Switzerland, sporting my new, uber-British bag. So, Karen and I now have an international correspondence (hence the Swiss stamps).

In Geneva, apartment buildings have a row of letter-boxes, each one with the name of the person living there on a tiny gold plaque. I don’t have a plaque, but I’ve managed to tack my name onto my box with a pink post-it note. I’ve heard that if your name isn’t there, you don’t get your mail.

Karen's Christmas Card

A bird theme has crept up on Karen and me through our letters. First in the cards Karen sent me, then in the book I gave her for Christmas (which I chose before I knew she wanted to write around them). Birds are on Swiss stamps and everywhere in the city: sparrows and pigeons pecking breadcrumbs from snow, swans taking flight over the lake, ducks burying their heads in their feathers to keep warm on the water. Last week I even saw a duck with an orange mohawk. A bit like this one:

As Karen says below, I’m interested in ‘flight’ as a theme. Karen’s post prompted me to do some brainstorming around what I mean by ‘flight’ and what makes me drawn to it. Here’s the flight-thought page from my notebook:

I’ve realised the main reason it appeals to me is because of my grandfather, who died in 2004. He was from East Germany and arrived in the UK as prisoner of war at the age of about 19. It’s difficult to write about him, either in poems or (perhaps especially) on a blog, as he was such a private person. But his biggest passion was flying gliders. He even met my grandmother (an au-pair girl from Sweden) on the airfield outside Cambridge. Two months to the day before he died, he was up in the air.

My grandfather only took me gliding once. I must have been about 13. The glider had two cockpits, one at the front, where the student works the plane, and one at the back for the instructor, who has the same controls as the student and can see what they’re doing. So with him as my guide, I flew a glider 2000 feet above Cambridge. I remember it being very peaceful up there – after take-off, you’re literally catching the clouds. It was a beautifully clear day and we could see all of the city and surrounding villages.

I don’t know where these thoughts will take me, but I’ll keep sending letters…

Here are two of the cards Miriam has sent me since we started our correspondence.

Some birds have all the talent. Take the Mockingbird, for example. Mimic, composer, arranger, vocalist, clown, he still finds time to devote to his family." Charles Harper's Birds & Words

Both are lino cuts Miriam made herself. She sent three, but although it’s not lost, I can’t lay my hands on the third right now. It was so exciting receiving them. There’s something quite magical about the wood/lino cut as a form. Bare branches become barer. The tree’s limbs more clear. The prospect of news. Letter writing is, I realise, inherently intimate.

Over the holidays I’ve found making things to be very calming. Folding a sheet of A4 was an antidote to the stresses of the season. I created several little origami books of a single poem called An Aviary of Small Birds. The petals you can see in the picture are from bouquets of flowers I dried over the summer and I used these as a backdrop on the paper for the book.

Birds have become something of a presiding spirit in my correspondence with Miriam, as well as a motif within my new work. Now of course they pop up everywhere. We went to Liverpool for Christmas. The city is represented by a mythic Liver Bird, a cormorant-eagle cross.

I didn't write much in Liverpool except on the back of an envelope. The phrase 'foghorns wake me at wren o'clock' has lodged in my head. A starting point.

Something to play with:

Boxing Day and I wake at wren o’clock to the sound of foghorns so deep and loud I think they’re a mobile phone on vibrate. I imagine giant sea lions bellowing across briny mist in  baritones. The foghorns are grief and they miss me….

In her latest letter Miriam says she is more interested in flight than in birds. This made me think about whether I am interested in birds that cannot fly. For Christmas she sent me a beautiful book: Charles Harper’s Birds & Words.

Flightless birds include the Great Auk that Harper says ‘swam like a fish, walked like a penguin and flew like a stone’ who was hunted to extinction for oil and feathers, as was the Labrador Duck, who lost the power of flight during the breeding and moulting season. On Christmas Day we ate goose and in the January sales we bought a new goose down duvet.

I also bought myself a treat: a first edition (in English) of Pablo Neruda’s Art of Birds. Jack’s Schmitt’s translation is sublime. Not that I know it in the original, but there’s such a purity to it I think you can safely say it’s a good one.

OCTOBRINE: The tricolored octobrine/is born, lives, and dies in October:/it has a revolver's blue shape,/feathers descended from mother of pearl,/tail like a celestial sign,/and this bird is fragrant/like the bee's homeland:/it sings seven copper notes:/then seven notes of rain.//And the intense octobrine dies/a blue and natural death.

Octobrine is my favourite poem. It is blue and intense. As high as the foghorns are low. Outside it’s dark now and snow is just starting to fall. I wonder where the parakeets go in this freezing weather?

I suspect that now I am thinking about birds as a subject I’ll have to look away from them to write about them. I think you need to catch a poem out of the corner of your eye. Meanwhile, the snow still falls…

Today I received my first letter from Karen. Since our meeting on Monday I’ve had a strange expecting-post feeling – an excitement. The feeling comes in the morning, but of course the post doesn’t. But when I got home at 11pm, there it was. Karen sent her letter in a beautiful card with a picture of a bird – a symbol for our new correspondance. Here’s a half-light photo:

Inside was a pressed flower: white, with yellow stamens poking out, surrounded by grass-like shoots – like the veins of a leaf without the structure.  I’ll have to ask Karen what kind it is. Opening the envelope was pure delight. A letter holds so many possibilities, so simply.

I’ve been thinking and talking a lot about letters this year. I sent and received hundreds of letters as a teenager, partly because I moved from the Scottish Highlands to Devon, leaving my best friends behind. In April this year, as part of the Slow Down London festival, I ran my first Creative Letter Writing Workshop at Foyles bookshop. The idea was to ask ‘What do letters mean now that they’re no longer an essential means of communication?’. For me, the answer to this is exciting, because I don’t know – they can become whatever we want – fragile documents found only in archives and museums, or a living form of writing that opens doors to the unexpected…

This Autumn I ran a series of ‘Snail Mail’ workshops, and received an amazing and certainly unexpected response. All sorts of people have shared stories – memories of opening letters, letter-inheritances from loved ones, the need to receive something physical in times of grief. One participant wrote a letter to her pair of walking boots, another to the science cabinet at his primary school, another to ‘flirtatiousness’. Some of these letters can be seen on my website.

As well as the workshops, I’m keen to explore letters and letter writing in my poetry. So I couldn’t have been happier when Karen invited me to start a creative correspondance. We haven’t imposed any criteria on ourselves – it will be organic and neither of us knows what will happen. I already feel inspired – receiving a carefully pressed flower, smelling faintly of the book it once lived in, has to be the start of something beautiful…

This is where I stop typing, and pick up my pen…