Birds are a vital element in Finnish culture and literature. In early folklore and poetry, birds were symbols for human emotions, the soul and the art of poetry. The advent of modernist poetics changed the role of these poetic animals. Lexixal transcriptions and visual renderings of bird songs and calls, typographical representations of flight and eggs and detailed descriptions of bird life began to appear in poetry, giving rise to all kinds of bird-likenesses. From the perspective of literary criticism, this avian poetics raises new questions: how are birds in poetry, how do they influence writing, is there such a thing as poetic avian agency?
Kui trittitii! Finnish Avian Poetics focuses on the bird-themed poetry of six Finnish poetts - Eero Lyyvuo, Maila Pylkkönen, Timo Haajanen, Sauli Sarkanen, Jouni Tossavainen and Antti Salminen - outlining a concept of avian poetics by drawing on ecocriticism and environmental philosophy and by examining the multifarious relations between birds, writing and language. Avian poetics is both a method for reading poetry and a theoretical description of how poetry works, based on the material living context formed by the appearance, behaviour, forms of life and living environment of real birds.
Bird photographs by Finnish nature photographers Oskari Härmä and Ari Kuusela introduce the reader to the diversity of Finland's birds.