Golden boy

the long version

"The Goldfinches of Baghdad, Adamson's first book published in North America, teems with cockatoos, kookaburras, lyrebirds, dollarbirds, and a host of waders from his native region. At once real presences and sly emissaries of the poetic imagination, these birds perform aspects of ourselves just as we assume their weird attributes: "The shadow your hand casts / resembles the mudlark, opening / its wings, calling and rocking, / perched in the pages / of my book." Coming from elsewhere, they transgress human boundaries, ignoring sign posts and political borders. As birds and words exchange places, Adamson charts their migration. His poems arrive as epistles from the other side of the world."--Publisher's website. An account of the author's coming-of-age in 1950s Hong Kong describes his experiences of early adolescence as a British citizen in a Chinese society and the conflicts between his Chinese-embracing mother and bigoted father.