Customer Reviews

Bestiary: An Anthology of Poems about Animals

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The Random House College Dictionary defines : bestiary (bes' che er' e) a collection of moralized descriptions of actual or mythical animals.

Stephen Mitchell chose some of the best poems and haikus ever written about animals for his anthology. "My main requirement, besides quality" he writes, "has been that a poet see the animal with a clear mind - not as a metaphor or symbol, but as it is in itself - and write from a place of deep empathy, entering the animal and, to a greater or lesser extent, becoming one with it." To sample a few:


Old pond,
Frog jumps in -
Splash. --Basho


Hedgehog

He ambles along like a walking pin cushion,
Stops and curls up like a chestnut burr.
He's not worried because he's so little.
Nobody is going to slap him around. ---Chu Chen Po



Don't kill that fly!
Look - It's wringing it's hands,
Wringing it's feet. ---Issa

Among the many offerings, are poems by William Carlos Williams, Rainer Maria Rilke, Yeats, William Cullen Bryant, Thomas Hardy, Robert Burns, D.H. Lawrence, Robinson Jeffers, and Emily Dickinson.

A bird came down the walk-
He did not know I saw-
He bit an angleworm in halves
And ate the fellow, raw, ---Emily Dickinson

Tyger tyger, burning bright,
In the forest of the night
What immortal hand or eye,
Could frame thy fearful symmetry.
---William Blake from "The Tyger"


The poems in this volume do , indeed, meet Mitchell's requirements. Pure poetry satisfaction!