‘Whatever the bird does is right for the bird to do –’

Judith Wright

Australian poetry has always had a particular affinity for birds. This can be either infuriating or indispensable, depending on whom you consult. We might blame Judith Wright for this affinity – or the British pastoral tradition. We might blame the big prizes associated with ecopoems. Or we could just admit that birds are actually really cool and totally worthy of our poetic attention. Kate Fagan intuits all this with Song in the Grass, and she both leans into it and subverts it in equal turns.

It feels impossible not to go into a collection with such a title expecting ninety-two pages of heavily naturalistic and pastoral imagery. Indeed, things kick off with the poem ‘one year one garden’, which, somewhat perversely, just lists a bunch of birds. It is like a copy-and-pasted eBird checklist from the Blue Mountains. And with this, what Fagan seems to say is: grab your binoculars and 600mm telephoto lenses, folks, let’s chill out and appreciate nature for a while.