Poetry and Animals Blurring the Boundaries With the Human by Onno Oerlemans

Poetry and Animals Blurring the Boundaries With the Human by Onno Oerlemans published by Columbia University Press is an interesting book about poetry and why people, writers, poets are interested and write about animals.
Oerlemans says that he wrote this book as a: "Field guide of poetry about animals which is both an overview and a sampling, one that begins to account for the variety of work poetry can do for and about animals and our interests in them."
The curiosity of writing about animals, from domestics to wild ones  is originally derived by fables with their own symbolic meanings.
The lamb can be our Lord, or an innocent animal sacrificed and so on.
"Defining the animal as a way of defining the human is as old and common as beer" writes the author but also as adds Margaret Atwood can be "A way of reflecting some large truth about humanity."
Killing animals remarks our supremacy, but also of course, for extension, a habit to see the death, living connected with that dimension and the reality of this existence.
Some poets will write about invisible animals or about the departure of an animal, positive or negative, a moment of sufferance or joy.
Why animals are so relevant for poetry?
Animals are all different and each of them in grade to speak to our soul individually. More, each of them have a specific reputation.
Isn't it true?
A lamb will be pacific, a wolf will be tremendous, a bird, if little, nice, lovable, cute, a butterfly dreaming, poetic and colored, a hummingbird enchanting, a  snake dangerous, a scorpion, bloody hell what a nasty meeting.
Each of them (with people is more difficult because we must define every person we meet) speak a certain "language" to writers and poets.
William Blake's "The Lamb" and "The Tyger" are the best examples that can be picked up regarding the "spiritual classification of animals."
Animal encounters, single animals, the death of animals, are topics treated, although this latest one not yet much, when it is a domestic pet because it is still considered too embarrassing. Who knows why.

A beautiful reading, where the importance of animals for poets of the past passing through the most recent ones is remarked in all its magnificence.

Great poems from the most beloved poets, from Walt Whitman to Chaucer, from Coleridge to Emily Dickinson, including the most modern ones.

Highly recommended.

I thank Columbia University Press for the physical copy of this book.

Anna Maria Polidori