Top ten bird poems

Simon Armitage's nine poetry collections include The Universal Home Doctor and Travelling Songs. Tim Dee is a BBC radio producer the author of The Running Sky, a memoir of his birdwatching life. Their new book is The Poetry of Birds, an ornithologically ordered anthology of the best bird poems.

For the Guardian they each named five favorite bird poems.

One of Armitage's picks:

"Leda and the Swan" by WB Yeats.

A poem of brutality and wild beauty. I've always given swans a wide birth since reading this poem at school.

Read about the other nine poems on their list.

--Marshal Zeringue