As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Birds \u0026 Books by Alex Preston

As Kingfishers Catch Fire: Birds \u0026 Books Reviews

• 
  Jason

  I love everything about this book, the hardback cover is a close-up of a kingfisher, you can clearly see the fire in the feathers, the paper used is thick and a joy to turn, each time I thought I was turning two pages at once when it was only one and it made me smile each time. The content is a fusion of birds, books, poetry, autobiography and art.
  
  Alex Preston shares the moments in his life when he falls in love with each bird featured here, these scenes are well written, from being shown his first bird by an aunt to his father battling cancer in bed being watched over by Collared Doves, you can really sense his love for these feathery creatures.
  
  I knew that poets and writers over the years had been influenced by birds in their writing but I never realised just how much they were ingrained into their work. D. H. Lawrence especially uses them a lot, Ted Hughes too, I knew he had his book called "Crow" but so many more birds influenced him, I think he gets a mention in most chapters. This book has greatly increased my reading list. My favourite clip of a poem mentioned has to be about Heron's by Paul Farley:
  
  "One of the most begrudging avian take-offs
  is the heron's fucking hell, all right, all right,
  I'll go the garage for your flaming fags
  cranky departure"
  
  Also featured was one of my favourite poems, written by Kathleen Jamie about geese:
  
  "Whit dae birds write on the dusk?
  A word niver spoken or read.
  The skeins turn hame,
  on the wind's dumb moan, a soun,
  maybe human, bereft."
  
  Finally there is the art work by Neil Gower, absolutely stunning, it blends perfectly with the prose on the pages and he has captured the birds perfectly. My favourite has to be of the Wrens, he has reproduced their bossiness, you can almost hear them shouting at you to move along and go walk by another hedge.
  
  This book is highly recommended by me, you've gotta own a copy even if you aren't a bird lover.
  
  My Blog review is here:
  https://felcherman.wordpress.com/2017...
  
  Notes on the second reading: The poems and clips of other writers work have been taken from Alex Notebooks over the last 25 years, I find it awesome that he has read something he likes and has copied it down in a notebook. Info about the Dove, a bird associated with peace, it made the most of WWII to spread far and wide. Finally, I love how Neil Gower has made the Nightingale look like one of the most beautiful birds ever.
• 
  Rebecca

  A simply gorgeous physical book: the orange cloth spine; the electric-blue feather detail on the cover; the Escher-esque interlocking kingfishers on the endpapers; and the full-color illustrations (by Neil Gower) opening each chapter. 5 stars on appearance. But the contents? I don’t really value books like this that are mostly composed of quotes from other authors; they strike me as lazy or even cheaty. I expected much more of a straightforward memoir of Preston’s life with birds. As it is, the autobiographical material is parceled out in a miserly fashion, as if the author was putting in the bare minimum before getting back to all the literary passages he was so clever to have found in his years of reading. If this wasn’t going to be a memoir, I would have preferred it to be an anthology of poetry and prose extracts. The attempt at combining the two didn’t succeed for me particularly well. It works best in my favorite chapter, “Waxwings,” in which an experience of coming across a flock of waxwings while in Siberia for a literary festival leads him into a consideration of Nabokov’s Pale Fire.
• 
  Paul

  It was Alex Preston’s Aunt that foster his love of the natural world and birds in particular. But in his teenage years, skateboarding and listening to Niverna was considered much cooler by his peers than being stuck in a draughty hide. This passion was suppressed but it never went away. Instead, Preston was drawn into an avian world between the covers of books where the poetry and writings from luminaries such as Dillard and Fiennes, Hardy and Hughes. It took another decade and a half for him to feel comfortable in the things that he wanted to do and this reignited his desire to watch birds again.
  
  Taking us through twenty-one birds as exotic as the blue streak that is the kingfisher and the inspiration for the title of the book, the tiny wren, and the speed of the swifts, Preston extols the virtues of each, weaving in poetry and prose taken from the books that made an impact as he grew up. There are personal stories too, his father with cancer, being alone deep into Russia and his wedding in December. All of these memories are written with a stark honesty.
  
  Each of the twenty-one chapters is fronted by a breath-taking image created by the graphic artist Neil Gower. These full sizes colour plates show the bird is a typical scene, a peregrine in a stoop, the murmurations of the starlings, Skylarks float over golden fields and the silence of the barn owl. Scattered throughout are black and white sketches of the birds and other objects, even the endpapers are a thing of beauty; the kingfishers that make up the pattern are caught by Gower in that moment as they dive to fish. Whilst I have read some of the books that he mentions in the text I now have a longer list of items that I want to read. Preston has got to the very essence of what makes the natural world and birds in particular necessary to make ourselves whole. The book is so well produced, with its spectacular cover, high quality pages and tactile binding. It is a joy to hold and a delight to read.
  
  Review with pictures on my blog:
  
  http://halfmanhalfbook.blogspot.co.uk...
• 
  Neil

  It will be obvious to anyone who knows me why my wife bought this book for me as a Christmas present. The front cover gives it a subtitle of “Books And Birds”. Let’s acknowledge here that my photography has now gone beyond what could legitimately be called a hobby - this then means that my two main actual hobbies are reading and birdwatching. This book should be a perfect match for me.
  
  And, I think the author had something perfect for me in mind. In the introduction he says:
  
  If this book works as I want it to, it’ll appeal to birder and non-birder alike. I‘d love it to be as vital a companion to ornithologists as their field guides, illuminating all the webs of meaning, of joy that birds spin out behind them: triangulating between the bird, the world and literature.
  
  For all these reasons I opened the book full of anticipation.
  
  Here’s the point where I acknowledge a sense of disappointment that grew in me as I read. A sense of disappointment that did gradually fade but never quite went away. Each chapter focuses on a different bird, twenty-one of them. Each chapter opens with a full-page illustration of the bird by Neil Gower, and further small illustrations are at the start and end of the text for each chapter. But it was the text that bothered me as all the chapters seemed to take the same format which consists of collecting together many, many quotes from novels and poetry that refer to each bird. That in itself would be fine. What I found didn’t work for me is the lack of anything else in the book: it seems to string together quote after quote without providing anything extra. True, each chapter starts with some kind of anecdote, but certainly a lot of the early chapters then seem to descend into multiple quotes.
  
  It's also true that there are some chapters where the author lets his hair down and gives us an insight into himself and his relationship with birds. Hoping for another of these is what kept me going because there were some tantalising snippets that would make a fascinating pieces if they were expanded.
  
  Towards the end of the book, I found myself slightly revising my opinion. I don’t think the basic style changed very much. But I did begin to look back over the book and think about what it had been presenting to me. And what I found myself thinking about is how different birds have come to symbolise different things in human emotion. The crow, made famous by Ted Hughes, carries the burden of darkness in our imagination. The curlew speaks of loneliness or isolation (notice whenever a TV program wants to let you know you are in the middle of nowhere you will hear a curlew call). The barn owl (or owls in general, really) seem to conjure up the spiritual world. And so it goes on.
  
  As a long-term birdwatcher, I might be slightly over-enthusiastic about this.
  
  So, if you want a good overview of how different birds are represented in literature, then this would be a good book for you to read. I am less convinced that it is a “vital companion to ornithologists”. Which is a shame. It probably deserves a slightly higher rating than I am giving it, but all my ratings are more about my feelings about a book than they are about the quality of the book and I came into this one with high expectations that I didn’t feel it quite lived up to.
  
  PS The book scores bonus points for making me realise how completely I misread Max Porter’s Grief Is The Thing With Feathers which I will now have to re-read.
• 
  Kim

  This wonderful book is a hard book to find a genre for, it fits into many.
  Part a memoir of the author's interesting life as part of a literary family and associates.
  Each chapter is sheltered under the wing of a particular well known European bird and there are bright gems of references to that bird in poetry and literature feathered throughout the chapter. Memories of Swifts in Paris, Waxwings in Russia, Seagulls on a Boston beach, and many encounters throughout the UK spark these musings. The chapters are accompanied by fresh colourful artwork by Neil Gower, who is also illustrating the new release covers of Bill Bryson's backlist.
  A beautiful example of nature writing and literary criticism.
  One I'd like to re-read but reluctantly need to return to the library.
  Highly recommended to read and savour at your leisure.
• 
  Nicky Reed

  It's a lovely idea, and a great combo: books and birds. A sort of literary-birdish concordance.
  Credit is shared between the author - responsible for the text and the illustrator, responsible for the...yep, you've got it. Each bird's entry has a full-page illustration. Dare I admit that these did little for me? Sorry. They were very reminiscent of 1970s Ladybird book illustrations - which I rather enjoy in 1970s Ladybird books: I just wasn't expecting them here.
  I don't think the book offers any stellar insights into either birds or birds in literature, but there were some moving pieces of writing, generally where Preston shares little moments of birdy significance from his own life. I love, for example, the image of a young boy sitting all the way through any Shakespeare he went to see with his parents, waiting for, and mentally ticking off, the birds he'd swotted up on and knew were to be mentioned. And the apparent love the author has for both birds and literature leave a mark too.
  Even had I enjoyed nothing else about this book (and that's not the case) it would have been absolutely worth reading simply for the rather astonishing dialect term for a kestrel, whispered in the notes. One I've not heard before and which has left an unshakeable image in my head. I'm now on a quiet quest to identify where this dialect term is applied...Please help me if you can!
• 
  Rubi

  Es un libro hermoso, sentido y repleto de remembranzas; el autor trasluce su pasión por las aves en un tejido de historias, recuerdos y poemas que me ha resultado inspirador, evocador y nostálgico.
  It's a beautiful book, heartfelt and full of memories; the author reveals his passion for birds intertwining stories, memories and poems that has been inspiring, evocative and nostalgic for me.
• 
  Leanne

  I fell in love with this book at first sight. It was on a display shelf at Shakespeare and Co in Paris--signed.... and the physical book, with its gorgeous illustration, so beautifully published , totally bowled me over. Dragging it home, it has sat on my bedside table ever since. I love reading it in snippets. Books and Birds.... Birds in novels and in poetry.... a lot of art is mentioned as well.
  
  Below is from the review in the Guardian by Blake Morrison
  
  https://www.theguardian.com/books/201...
  
  "Further back in the family tree, there’s Edward Grey, Britain’s longest-serving foreign secretary, famous for saying (in 1914): “The lights are going out all over Europe”, and less well-known as the author of a book (a model for this one) called The Charm of Birds. There are fascinating glimpses into Grey’s marriage (probably unconsummated), and his friendship with Henry Newbolt. But it’s always to birds that Preston returns.
  
  His book is less a polemic on conservation than a plea for close looking and close listening. He believes, with Gerard Manley Hopkins (from whom he takes his title), that the world is charged with grandeur – the world of birds especially – and that our lives are the richer when we attend to that grandeur. “What thou art we know not,” Shelley tells his skylark, but some of the greatest poems in the language have come from the effort to find out."
• 
  Emily

  I should have liked this book (Birds!) but I just didn’t. The book, however, is 5-star beautiful and the illustrations by Gower are incredible (the waxwings are worth the price of the book). The writing seemed almost like bragging at times (look at all this smart literature I read!) and there was hardly any story here just a mish-mash of passages that I was assumed to know what was going on. Even the author’s descriptions of the passages, so that the reader might have some context, were really confusing and did not illuminate the writing like I hoped it would. Surprisingly the best chapter was on Gulls because I felt like there was an actual, graspable theme that wove itself through the chapter. There were some gems here, not all was lost, but they are sort of lost in an odd sea. Anyway, this is a mostly confusing book that made me feel dumb, but it is pretty, so...
• 
  Alex Watson

  There ought to be more books like this. It's beautifully designed, a compelling mix of genres and suffused with care and attention. Each chapter takes a specific bird and mixes autobiography, literary criticism and bird biography - essentially, rather like listening to a fascinating lecture - and gives you the story of both the bird as a piece of nature and the bird as cultural metaphor. The writing is clear and compelling and the presentation is stellar - from the endpapers to the bespoke paintings of birds that introduce each chapter - the book is physically a really great artefact.
• 
  Ashleigh

  A beautiful and interesting book that I have read over a long period of time and will go back to in the future. I think it’s the sort of book I needed to read slowly and am looking forward to reading it again to get the most out of it and cover bits I didn’t take in fully the first time. It has highlighted lots of new literature that I am keen to read and was a joy to read. And the illustrations are wonderful.
• 
  Jennifer

  This was a beautiful book with Neil Gower's illustrations, and a skilled and satisfying work of design -fighting back against the eReader! As so often, the birder is academically a non-scientist, English literature specialist and here there is an explicit intention to bring literature into the book. That works well as one of the rich strands alongside ornithology and memoir.
• 
  Eolaí

  I read this book intentionally slowly. No more than one chapter, one bird, a day. And a day when I was at home alone. Because I read it out loud. It was a treat to myself, a wonderful experience, and I shall read it again.
• 
  Stevyn Colgan

  A beautiful, beautiful book. Beautiful words, beautiful paintings. It's what books are for.
• 
  Tracey Wilde

  Beautiful illustrations
• 
  Medardo Nkhoma

  Good book
• 
  Velma

  Feather and fascicle - Yes, please!