'The Spirit's hardly wearing thin/ so much as changing shape' ('Letter to Friends')
'[...] magpies
are untranscendent and corporeal;
they are grounded. They are guardians. They keep guarded
the black and white beneath the feathers' gloss.
('Magpies')
Leontia Flynn, Profit and Loss (London: Cape, 2011), 42; 58.
