However, just like Dolly Parton – who reportedly modelled her blonde-bombshell look on her home-town's prostitute, and quipped "It costs a lot of money to look this cheap" – Brand (who describes his Black Sparrow-image as "S&M Willy Wonka", and is depicted Che Guevara-style on his current tour posters) seems to be having the last laugh.
And that sparrow is the image that lingers, more so than the headless plantation owner at his desk, who leaves Harry "surprisingly unmoved".
While the image of the struggling sparrow lingers long after one finishes her book, at times the passages of personal memoir Dr. Montross weaves in to contrast her relatively normal life with those of her patients feel jarring and unnecessary.
A great storm arises which dwindles the strength of mankind: These lines, described by West as "the finest passage of poetry yet known from the Catalogue", might parallel Calchas' prophecy in Iliad 2, which presages the first nine fruitless years of the Trojan War via the image of a snake devouring nine sparrows.
In the lovely, compassionate "When Did You Last See Castagno?" - a "life's journey" poem in the deftest of terza rima - the poet addresses a painted Last Supper through the detail of a bird, which he first brings to contemporary life as a sparrow inside the church and then releases into Bede's famous image for the transience of human life.
Instead, a further question, related and perhaps even tougher, shoulders into the opening line "What is living?" The answer – "The broad hall found/ between narrow walls" – recalls the Venerable Bede's image of human life as the flight of a sparrow across the mead hall.
In the meantime, here is a Lukas Coch's image of Abbott leaping the church stairs in a single bound at sparrow's, this morn.
More crucially, he has an instinct for the kind of brimmingly charged image that short stories depend on for their peculiar alchemy - a sparrow painted with green and red enamel paint; an enormous man on a bed, slicing the air with a sword..
Two women about to be hanged for resisting the Nazis are described as "wingless sparrows," as if the genuine pathos needed to be amped up with a sentimental image.
Porcelain sparrow by Roost, $10.
