Jean Atkin

THE social history of dovecots

And in the sunlight, you might see dovecots.
The mellow, cooing towers of them, white plumes
of wings rising from them in the mornings.
And at dusk, the tiered dash of feathers,
neat pigeonholing of each bird, its bright eyes.
How roundly the dovecots sheltered their flocks, how
pleasing they are in the corners of great gardens,
synthesis of what’s handsome and what’s practical.

Their tiled, conical roofs. Their gilt weathercocks
perched high upon the pinnacle. All that crowing.
And an old man snatching squabs out of nestboxes,
wringing each white neck, tucking each one in his sack.
Then the plucked birds roasted, couched on gleaming
china, and set out by the landless, before the grand.

Jean Atkin is an award-winning and widely published poet who works in education and community. Her third full poetry collection High Nowhere was published by IDP in 2023, and nominated for the 2024 Laurel Prize for environmental and nature poetry. ‘I dare you to finish reading this book and emerge indifferent to the role of humans in the plight of the earth. That’s the mark of Atkin’s success’ (Matthew Stewart, reviewing in Rogue Strands, 2024).

Jean wrote the following about her poem:

I did see this dovecot in sunlight, in the grounds of a big house. And I thought just how elegantly functional such surviving buildings are — and how absolutely rooted they are in the class system. And how landless most of us still are: in 2019 it was estimated that half of England is owned by less than 1% of the population. The poem took me quite a long time to get right, but I found these thoughts lent themselves very naturally to a sonnet form.