Top 10 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 Dee's picks:

"The Windhover" by Gerard Manley Hopkins.

A poem that enacts as well as describes, as if Hopkins were channelling a kestrel hovering 100ft up in the wind; it is mind-blowing no matter how many times you read it.

Read about one of Armitage's choices on the top ten list.

--Marshal Zeringue