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Product Description
Product Description
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.
About the Author
Paul Muldoon was born in County Armagh in 1951. He read English at Queen's University, Belfast, and published his first collection of poems, New Weather, in 1973. He is the author of ten books of poetry, including Moy Sand and Gravel (2002), for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and Horse Latitudes (2006). Since 1987 he has lived in the United States, where he is the Howard G. B. Clark Professor in the Humanities at Princeton University. From 1999 to 2004 he was Professor of Poetry at Oxford University. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, Paul Muldoon was given an American Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1996. Other recent awards include the 1994 T. S. Eliot Prize, the 1997 Irish Times Poetry Prize, and the 2003 Griffin Prize.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I really enjoyed this book. I initially needed it as a study aid and in the beginning just flicked through it but after reading the whole anthology, found it an absorbing and delightful read.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
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 Snail
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire...
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 Snail
The snail pushes through a green
night, for the grass is heavy
with water and meets over
the bright path he makes, where rain
has darkened the earth's dark. He
moves in a wood of desire...
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a set book for an Open University course that starts in September. Never did a set book give me so much pleasure. I read at least one poem a day and it's always a delight. The poems are among the best our literature has to offer; all styles, all ages. The animals do not dominate. I often forget that there is an animal somewhere in the poem. If I have one gripe it is that the editors offer no explanations of achaic or dialect words. For example, anyone who is unfamiliar with the Scots language will have trouble with some of Robert Burns' texts.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Beastly Indeed!!
This is one of the books recommended for AA100 Open University. It is packed full of poetry Coleridge, Hughes, Heaney, Larkin, the list goes on. Each poem features animals. Read more
Published 3 months ago by The Reader
Open University AA100 Student
This book was dispatched and delivered to me quickly, and in excellent condition. It was very well priced. Perfect reading :)
Published 8 months ago by Miss LH Winterburn
Excellent purchase
Item arrived fast ad in good condition, a really good buy at a bargain price very happy with this product
Published 10 months ago by hayley
The Faber Book of Beasts
I bought this as part of my OU Foundation course for Arts and Humanities & altho' the course refers to very few of the poems I haven't stopped reading the anthology yet! Read more
Published on 25 May 2010 by BazK
The Faber Book of Beasts
This was bought as one of the set books the the Open University AA100 course. It has some lovely poetry in it, all about animals.
Published on 30 Mar 2010 by Mrs. P. A. Ward
If you like poetry this book is a must!
This is a brilliant anthology. It made me appreciate some poets work alot more and has encouraged me to hunt out more of their work. Read more
Published on 19 May 2009 by David Howe
Fascinating
Loved this book. A treat filled with poetry that amuses, delights, scares and always highlights our relationship with animals.
Published on 19 April 2009 by Sharpshooter
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