Published autumn 2004 and selling well at home and abroad, Of Birds and Men is the remarkable collection from an Iranian poet. Mahmud Kianush is a poet, novelist, critic, the founder of children's poetry in Iran, as well as a broadcaster and translator (incl. the anthology Modern Persian Poetry for Rockingham). Now he has gathered the English poems he has been writing since settling here from Tehran in 1976. Of Birds and Men: Poems from a Persian Divan uses the traditional forms of Persian poetry -- including poems addressed to birds -- to comment tellingly on the modern world. Here are poems about dictatorship, political hypocrisy, casualties of war in Bosnia, the magical lure of money, jet travel and the fate of the Dodo.