“A crow can recall every route it has ever taken…crows are messengers, spies, guides, companions, harbingers of luck, deliverers of trinkets and treasures, tireless in all ways, more loyal than any other man or beast.”

~Alice Hoffman

I’m sure you all know Alice Hoffman’s writing, but if not, you may recognize the names Practical Magic and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. But she’s published over thirty books so there is a lot more to check out and enjoy.

For today, though, I’m focusing on this quote, attributed to her, which I love — as I also love crows. We don’t have them here in Aotearoa-New Zealand, but I’ve encountered them in Australia and Europe.

Of course, crows also have a bad rep in some quarters, as their collective terminology, “a murder of crows” indicates.

I also love the way Joanna Preston explores that rep in her poem of the same name, which is part of the Venery sequence:

“The wires were thick with them now,
hunched like grief against the sky.
…
a crow to show you
that a corvid’s breastbone
is the keel of a longship,
cleaving the air
…”

©  Joanna Preston, The Summer King, Otago University Press, 2009

I’ve only featured a few of my favourite lines, but what a way with words, eh?

Absolutely no surprises (imho) that both The Summer King and Jo’s second collection, Tumble, have won multiple awards and been widely praised.

If you’d like to read some of her poems in full, as featured here and on The Tuesday Poem blog, here’s the list:

• Cowarral Sequence iii—A Summer Storm
• I Wish You Angels
• Cowarral Sequence ii—The Orange Tree
• Female Nude
• A Host of Sparrows
• Lijssenthoek
• Lucifer in Las Vegas

Enjoy!