The Faber Book of Beasts

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0571195474 ISBN 13: 9780571195473

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 1998

The Faber Book of Beasts is a collection of many of the best poems in English about the creatures who share our planet. The animal kingdom has prompted some of the liveliest and most enjoyable writing by poets, from Homer to our contemporaries. Among the creatures gathered here, tame or wild; common or exotic, are mammals, reptiles, birds, insects, and others perhaps more fanciful than real. A zoologist's delight.

There is, too, a moral or philosophical purpose. As Paul Muldoon says in his introduction: 'We are most human in the presence of animals.' And it is just this sense of how our humanity is illuminated by the contemplation of bestial life that he has set out to celebrate. The results are wonderfully rich and thought-provoking.

Book Description:

The Faber Book of Beasts, edited by Paul Muldoon, is a wonderfully rich and through-provoking poetry anthology - and a wonderfully entertaining one - which explores the sense that our humanity is illuminated by the contemplation of bestial life: a life this anthology sets out to celebrate.

About the Author:

Paul Muldoon is the author of thirteen collections of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel, for which he received the 2003 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and the most recent, Frolic and Detour (2019). His other awards include the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 2003 Griffin Prize, the 2015 Pigott Prize, and the 2017 Queen's Gold Medal for Poetry. Born in County Armagh in 1951, he has lived since 1987 in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University.