Its port dregs, your squeals ricochet from tumbledĭown burry clouds. Tails how each wingbeat scores broad arches in the wind And when you've tacked lowĪbove the house, I've studied your lean, cleaver-knife Into a straight-cut script I've tried to sound out. The sky's bayberry vellum, seen falling light transpose your silhouettes Of the storms you portend how you are a cipher Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets

– JB Calyptorhynchus funereus (Yellow-Tailed Black Cockatoos) We can see in Dimitra Harvey’s poem how the poetic imagination depends upon emotion, so that by the end, the speaker’s deep connection to the birds allows for an expansion and activation of knowledge. To my mind, poems created without a basis in feeling, however artful and clever, are ultimately dissatisfying. This poem is an excellent example of how the poet, through attention, exploration and invention, discovers the images and metaphors, the rhythms and sound patterns which open and reveal a unique set of meanings. What I enjoyed most is the way the birds intensely haunt the imagination of the speaker. The way colours are used in the poem is one of its attractions, the stark blackness of the birds is set off against ‘they sky’s bayberry vellum’ and at sunset when ‘the sun decants its port dregs’.

Right from the start the birds are linked with death: ‘Your plumes are as black as the dresses and jackets/ we wear at the edges of burial plots.’ And later, ‘each wingbeat scores broad arches in the wind/ with the measured pace of pallbearers.’ The dark undertones in the poem burn off any hint of sentimentality and the birds quickly become augers, not only of death, but of the life-giving force of rain. Astute observation is at the heart of this poem, the poet’s careful pinpointing of particulars is what makes it so memorable, but the poem is so much more than just descriptive, it evokes many tones of mood and it richly maps the birds to landscape, weather and to folklore. I know bird poems have become almost a cliché in Australian poetry, but I have a great fondness for the topic and so I couldn’t resist Dimitra Harvey’s evocatively brocaded poem about yellow-tailed black cockatoos, Calyptorhynchus funereus.

Plumed black cockatoo