When Anthony Albrecht and I connect over Zoom, it doesn’t take long before the cellist and Bowerbird Collective co-founder starts reciting poetry.

There’s a good reason: his group’s upcoming Nature Festival performance draws its title from the opening line of American poet Emily Dickinson’s breathtaking 1861 poem:

‘Hope’ is the thing with feathers

That perches in the soul,

And sings the tune without the words,

And never stops at all…

“It’s an absolutely beautiful series of lines,” Albrecht says after reading aloud the first verse, his gentle, somewhat mesmerising voice sound-tracking our early morning conversation.

“There’s an innocence and a kind of simple, just beautiful, evocation of connection with the elemental things and the life forces of the world there.”

It’s also an apt d

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