Faber Book of Beasts

Thank goodness for Amazon.com, I was able to get this item, as well as all of the others before my Degree course began. The item arrived in plenty of time and in the condition I was expecting, many thanks to the seller AND to Amazon.com.

One of the best books out if you want to read poetry about animals through the ages.You have poets obscure and famous poets such as G.K.Chesterton who writes about "The Donkey" who had his hour, "one far fierce hour and sweet" p73/74 and William Blake's "The Tyger" a haunting picture of beauty and violence p271, alongside old and much loved rhymes like "Goosey Gander" p 101 and "Hickory Dickory Dock" p114.This is a glorious book that is both refreshing and nostalgic and is well worth having on your bookshelf for reference and fun.

The poetry in this book is outstanding. This book was bought for a course I was on with the Open University. Interesting book and worth it.

Lines have to be drawn in anthologies, as Paul Muldoon is quick to mention in his introduction. Through the poems he has chosen, his erudition and knowledge are beyond doubt, but I still can't help being just a little disappointed with the lines drawn, the poems missing - a very personal disappointment though it may be.The great and good of canonical English-language poetry are lined up (very occasionally some in translation) from Dante, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Lovelace, Clare, Swift, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats, Coleridge, Dickinson, Kipling, Frost, Yeats, Eliot, Auden, Moore, Bishop, Hughes and Plath. Of course, there are one or two surprises too!Delights include Gerard Manley Hopkins' "The Windhover"; Elizabeth Bishop's "The Moose" and D H Lawrence's "Bat"... but no doubt everyone will have their own favourites accounted for here. There are also interspersed rhymes from childhood like "Baa Baa Black Sheep" and "Cock Robin" alongside chunks from Whitman's "Song of Myself" or Browning's "The Pied Piper". The alphabetical ordering offers the reader quite an eclectic mix of time and style, as well as some interesting thematic juxtapositions.Why only four stars then, which seems a little mean? I just wish Muldoon had been a little more daring and selected some more modern poems from the last 50 years or so; poems not yet tried and tested as the majority of this anthology are... and I can't help feeling his refusal to accept work in translation (with certain exceptions) frustrating.Still, there's so much to admire here in this poetry that "brings out the best in us" as Muldoon observes, that no reader will leave this anthology unmoved.From Thom Gunn: Considering The SnailThe snail pushes through a greennight, for the grass is heavywith water and meets overthe bright path he makes, where rainhas darkened the earth's dark. Hemoves in a wood of desire...

Have borrowed this book several times from the library before buying a copy of my own. It's a book you can keep coming back to and enjoy all over again.

Fabulous collection of animal related poems and prose. This was purchased for my English Degree but is a nice collection to dip in and out of.

I bought this book for an OU module, and at first was not impressed. However, as I became more familiar with it it grew on me. There is a wide variety of poetry, including ditties such as 'There was an old lady who swallowed a fly' and traditional poetry such as 'The Flea' by John Donne, the (for me frankly unfathomable) Sylvia Plath poem 'Ariel' and some very graphic poems by Ted Hughes. A very comprehensive collection,arranged alphabetically rather than chronologically, which leads to some interesting juxtapositions, and without much of the sentimentality sometimes found around animals.