McKinney explains the circumstances in which the poems in the collection Birds were written. She says that for Wright it was a period of 'precious and dearly-won time of warmth and bounty to counterbalance at last what felt, in contrast, like the chilly dearth and difficulty of her earlier years. And the subtropical bounty of Tamborine's lush natural world embodied her experience ... She wrote poems of the rainforest, of its plants and flowers - and of its birds.'