Birdsong on Mars

The teasing title poem of this book is about weather. Rain falls, wind cracks its cheeks as in Macbeth; the noises are drops like kisses falling, 'fallen into birdsong on Mars'. What would it sound like, be like, to hear it? The poem wants to know what it can't yet know. But as the book proceeds, the poet - on a human heath, tormented by loss - hears something like it, unearthly sounds on a planet without atmosphere, sound making quite another kind of sense. Jon Glover wrote most of the poe...