Judith Wright's Birds is a collection of poetry and artwork focused on the description and appreciation of birds of all kinds. We'll discuss a few of the book's key features, using select poems as examples.

Most of the poems in Birds are lyrics. While usually simple in meter and rhyme, they are quite musical and emotional, as well as descriptive, and the birds, while important in themselves, also become symbols of human behavior. Take, for instance, the poem “Magpies.” It is a lyric in iambic tetrameter (eight syllables per line with stresses falling on even-numbered syllables) with a simple a-b-a-b rhyme pattern in each stanza. Wright describes both the appearance and behavior of the magpies. They look like they are strolling down the road with their hands in their pockets “In their well-fitted black and white” (line 4). They seem just like nonchalant, wise gentlemen “until their meal is served” (line 7). Then look out for their “clashing beaks” and “greedy eyes” (line 8). They become a lot like people at that point, vying with one another for what they want. But the moment is soon past, and the birds, often unlike people, return to their joyful songs “of grace and praise” (line 11) and thanksgiving to God. This simple poem becomes a reflection on humanity through the depiction of a few little magpies.

Indeed, Wright does not idolize the birds she describes in her poetry. Rather, she shows them as they truly are in nature. Look, for instance, at the poem “Black-shouldered Kite.” This nine-line lyric depicts a bird that is both beautiful and dangerous. The kite is “Carved out of strength” (line 1). He is marked with “pride and hunger” (line 4), an outcast as was the Biblical Cain after he had killed his brother, yet able to fend for himself, to push aside the strong wind. He is precise and calm even as “his still eye” “threatens harm” (line 7), and as he dives, this bird becomes a “knife-blade” (line 9), a killer even in his beauty.

Wright often includes a first-person narrative voice in her poetry, seemingly inserting herself into her work as she observes the birds around her. In “The Swamp Pheasant,” for instance, she watches the bird in question scrambling up her garden gate and running around her yard. It finds a lizard and a “tiny wart-eyed toad” (line 7), and in a moment, they are gone, eaten by the pheasant. Notice the delicacy and vividness of the descriptions here. Then out comes Violet the cat. He is already brushing a mouse's fur out of his whisker (quite the hunter, this cat) when he catches sight of the pheasant. The pheasant sees him, too, and pretty soon the narrator is laughing to see the bird dashing out like a “queer old woman...holding her brown skirts high behind / and scuttling on her long black feet” (lines 18-20). Obviously, the poet enjoys adding a bit of humor to her descriptions.

In “Extinct Birds,” Wright reflects with sadness on the birds that have vanished from the world. She writes of “Charles Harpur in his journals long ago” (line 1) recording with “hope and love” (line 2) the birds who were fading from nature. Now they have vanished, and even Harpur's work lies unprinted and unread. Wright invites readers to mourn with her for both the lost birds and the poverty of those who don't care.

Let's look at one more poem that sums up many of the key themes and meanings in Wright's book. “Birds” begins “Whatever the bird is, is perfect in the bird” (line 1). Birds behave according to their nature, when they tenderly care for their young or sweep out of the sky upon their prey. They are simply the creatures they were made to be. Humans, however, are not. “But I am torn and beleaguered by my own people,” the poet laments (line 11). Humans fight among themselves, trying to dominate one another, failing to be what they were created to be. The poet wishes she could leave the “battleground” of humanity, the complexities of life, “for the forest of a bird” (line 16) and become simple to herself “as the bird is to the bird” (lines 20).