Birds Knit My Ribs Together
what if/ I actually – am – a bird/ my cupped hands/ opening to release me… Phil Barnett’s relationship with birds, in particluar, is so close that his poetry blurs the distinctions between himself and the birds – a kind of ornimorphology where rather than giving the birds human characteristics, the reverse happens, and he occasionally imagines himself as a bird.
Phil Barnett
Phil Barnett is a photographer, writer, musician, artist, and naturalist, who has a passion for the birds that kept him company through a long hard illness. His photography and poetry have quite a following on social media, which is where we found him, on The Daily Haiku. His skill as a photographer leads to an acute visual sensibility, and his slow recovery moves from a tick sheet his mother had to fill in for him, to extraordinary poetry – full of wit and wonder, and spectacular language.