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a chatter of choughs
A Chatter of Choughs was first published in 2001, as an anthology of poems and essays gathered to raise awareness of the plight of the endangered sea bird, the Cornish chough. In Old English mythology, the soul of King Arthur is said to have flown into the body of a chough at the moment of his death; thus the bird preserves the spirit of the king, and is revered by other birds. Its strange piercing cry is like a battle call, its red legs and beak a royal armour, and its loyalty to its own means that it chooses only one mate for life. These unusual attributes and the mythic association contribute to the ongoing fascination with this rare bird, which has achieved cult status in Cornwall. The project was initiated by Professor Lucy Newlyn, Fellow of English at St. Edmund Hall, Oxford University. The collection is made up of contributions from students and professional academics alike, and was originally published by Signal press in Oxford for St. Edmund Hall. A second edition was published by the Cornish publisher The Hypatia Trust in 2005, which I illustrated. This new edition included further contributions from celebrated academics and Old English specialists such as Reggie Alton, Rex Warner, Grevel Lindhop, Tom Paulin, Andrew McNeillie, Bernard O’Donoghue, Bruce Mitchell, Terry Jones and Kevin Crossley-Holland. Selected illustrations are reproduced in the image gallery.
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