Lapwing [Paperback]

A lyrical biography of a bird and a fragmented study of a flawed and mutable creature bearing its name, Hannah Copley'sLapwingmigrates across voices and blurs the divide between bird and human, self and other to explore restlessness, addiction, and ecological and personal grief.Migrating across voices and blurring the divide between bird and human, self and other, Hannah Copley'sLapwingexplores restlessness, love, and ecological and personal grief in a vivid and incantatory sequence of poems.

A lyrical biography of a bird and a fragmented study of a flawed and mutable creature bearing its name, Copley's second collection takes inspiration from John Gower'sbrid falseste of alleand its many literary guises. At the heart of the book are the shifting figures of Lapwing and Peet, two creatures whose overlapping narratives echo the double note of the bird's cry. In Lapwing, known by countless names, migratory, and slowly disappearing beneath addiction, Copley examines a life in a slow tumble, as we are transported into a world shaped by real and imagined predators. Running alongside Lapwing is the searching voice of Peet, a daughter left to understand her father's vanishing while trying to make a life in a habitat no longer fit for survival.

Bold, exacting, and deeply personal, Copley's poems call out from empty nests, drained wetlands, and ploughed fields to create a soundscape of endangerment and wonder.Lapwingasks that we consider how, like the bird itself, we must all dissemble to survive. Lapwing is the name of the father in these poems, a father who is becoming lost to addiction, one who evades, flies away. A story of a daughter too, caught watching his tumbling flight that is both labored and light. Copley mixes the anthropomorphic with the incantatory to write a book so beautiful that it aches to read it. Juliana Spahr

'Lapwing is quite brilliant - a corkscrewing and glittering helix of art, a story in whichl#.