If you browsed a brick-and-mortar bookstore today you’d notice that we’re living in a time ripe with thematic poetry collections. Lots of them, often on special display. Newly edited volumes of poems, combining classic poets and poems with contemporary ones, on subjects including love, summer, grief, just to name a few. This one — on the gift of animals in human life — we found particularly special.
A foreword by Robin Wall Kimmerer, author of the surprise bestseller Braiding Sweetgrass — which is also about the interconnectedness of humans with nature — includes words of praise calling this collection “an antidote to species loneliness.” That’s exactly right. And of course the species Kimmerer is talking about is our own.
The subjects of these poems are often made explicit in the poem titles: from “Kissing a Horse” by Idaho poet Robert Wrigley, to “the earth is a living thing” by legendary Black poet Lucille Clifton (d. 2010), to “A Lament for the Dead Pets of Our Childhood” by the Georgia-born current Oxford Professor of Poetry, A.E. Stallings.
Contemporary poets outpace the classics by about five to one. And even among the contemporary poets there are modern classics such as Wendell Berry’s “The Peace of Wild Things” and Joy Harjo’s “Eagle Poem.” The opening lines of the latter go like this:
“To pray you open your whole self
To sky, to earth, to sun, to moon
To one whole voice that is you.
And know there is more
That you can’t see, can’t hear.”
There are plenty of dog poems, plus a fox, boar, bears, crustaceans, koalas, lark, turkeys, woodpeckers, scorpions, bees, snakes, and many other species being praised, lamented, called sacred, and remembered as ideal human companions.
We loved this book. The editor, at the end of a simple four-page introduction, explains: “My hope is that the poems spark a deeper appreciation for every creature who inhabits these pages…. My hope is that the poems inspire our biophilia — the human capacity to love and care for our animal relations.” It will.
