Do Songbirds Know Where They’re Singing: Poems by John B. Lee

Do Songbirds Know Where They’re Singing gathers John B. Lee’s profoundly humane meditations on war, memory, and the sanctity of the young. Sparked by graveside birdsong and anchored in archival testimony, the collection honours Canadian soldiers and the poet’s own kin, intertwining personal grief with national remembrance. Lee’s rhetorical cadences, vivid naturalism, and moral clarity-＂war is always a failure of the human imagination＂-shape a written monument against forgetting. From Auschwitz’s echoing sky to Ortona’s sorrow, he listens for hymns within history’s wreckage and answers with reverent, necessary witness. This is tender, unflinching work: elegy, indictment, and a lamp to carry.