What a great idea for a book! Bosselaar, the editor, has collected together a number of poems about city life. Specifically, city wildlife, and if you're expecting from that a bunch of poems about pigeons, well... you'd be right. There are a bunch of poems about pigeons here, and a lot of other birds, from sparrows to raptors. And trees, and potato bugs, and roadkill. I have to say, my favourite poem here, by a significant margin, was one of the poems about roadkill. It's by Gail White and it's called "Dead Armadillos" and I don't know whether I should say "Don't judge it by the title" or not, because it is indeed about armadillo roadkill, which does not strike me as the most poetic of subjects, perhaps, but it is also a catchy name, and represents a poem far less simplistic than that title might indicate.

Often, nature poems tend to the larger scale, and the grander subject. Numinous thing, like daffodils in the Lake District and so on. Many of the poems here have a harder, more sardonic edge; there is not a lot of romanticism going on here. There is a sense of real affection, though, even if it needs dusting down a little from the gulls in trash heaps and the odd dead rat. That makes it worth reading, I think.