“O happy creature! What stirs thee so? A spark of the gladness of God thou art”: the artwork by J. J. Audubon chosen for “The Swallow” by Celia Thaxter (1835-94) in this lavishly illustrated compilation, edited by Samuel Carr, The Poetry of Birds (Batsford, £14.99 (£13.50); 978-1-84994-835-7), which shows how much they have inspired poets, from the nightingales of Sidney, Milton, and Keats, and Shelley’s skylark, to Burns’s woodlark and Baudelaire’s albatross — rather than Coleridge’s; for here the latter is concerned with the question “Do you ask what the birds say?”