The story of… Singing Bird Box

Singing Bird Box by May Dearlove. An intricately folded envelope of mustard-gold paper secured with a small brown textured button and maroon thread, the title on a mint paper swatch, on sage tissue with printed text, a printed key with text ‘the lost key’ and handwritten brown luggage tag.

May Dearlove explains some of the back story to her intimate, intricate boxed and folded poem of many parts. One of Small Birds Press’s Summer 2026 launches, it is the second collaboration with another poet to produce an edition.

The concept for Singing Bird Box sprung from viewing a 19th-century object of the same name. Mechanical songbirds are extremely intricate automatons designed to spring up from inside musical snuffboxes and sing as they turn. It consists of a poetic text in a folded form. I settled on the book-work form to embody the inner and outer nature of the singing bird box, with its length and width made to the same miniature dimensions as the actual artefact. The ‘hinge’ of the book-work is at the top so that the front cover opens as a lid. Concentrating on this compressed space brought me to a compressed language where each word is sprung one to the other. It also brought me to the slippage of ‘were’ to ‘whirr’. Repetitions crept in. I crossed them out. Back they came. Like birdsong.

Singing bird boxes were made to ‘entertain’ the viewer. Rather than the pleasure afforded the viewer by such boxes, however, I wanted to explore what it was to be trapped in the box. How it was to be made to sing at the press of a button. To put on a face and perform. And, with the lid snapped shut, what it was to be alone in the dark. And with that darkness come secrets and abuse and unwanted thoughts that keep going round and round in the mind. I began thinking about the mechanism as a coping mechanism and wondering what happens if this breaks.

My original Singing Bird Box was a handmade collaged one-off piece shown in performance. Then, enter Caroline Harris, who invited me to make an edition with Small Birds Press. The challenge was how to translate this very tactile ‘thing’ into a printed edition, yet still retain its intimate handmade feel.

The choice of papers became very important, with Caroline and I spending considerable time thinking this through. The journey through the folded book-work begins with a Japanese gold-coloured paper as the box, which opens to the poem fragment entitled ‘A Domestic Trapping’, on a blue paper that resonates with the feathers of the boxed hummingbird and turquoise jewels of the 19th-century box. It then moves to a Zerkall paper, hand tinted with watercolour, for the ‘Inner Workings’. Zerkall papers are renowned for their exceptional quality, as were the mechanics of the singing bird boxes. The poem ends with a transparent tissue paper, printed with a handwritten text of ‘Taking Flight’ as the bird transforms from automaton to feather and bone, and escapes the box.

Of note: 19th-century automaton birds were dressed in real feathers, with ivory used for their beaks. In the case of hummingbirds, the loss of their feathers left them unable to fly and therefore unable to hum. These boxes now carry an auction saleroom notice about endangered species.