Pigs Might Fly

John Heath-Stubbs’ new collection is wise, wry and unexpected. In his eighty-sixth year, the poet commands his medium with a virtuoso’s easy lightness of touch, returning to lifelong preoccupations with a fresh and intimate attention. His responsiveness to the natural world, to birds in particular, is deepened by a lifetime’s observation and listening, and invigorated by delight in nature’s unfailing newness. Genial and tolerant, this collection mixes an inevitable nostalgia with light-heartedness; satirical squibs are balanced by moments of elegiac beauty. The grace of the moment is highlighted by an awareness of the continuities of natural and human history. C.H. Sisson called Heath-Stubbs ‘a Johnsonian presence with a Miltonic disability’ (a reference to the poet’s blindness); like Johnson in his later years, Heath-Stubbs’ learned urbanity is enormously generous and beguilingly gruff.