Thank you for posting this Jeremy. Serendipitously, I was reading Hughes' 'Moortown Diary' just yesterday, continuously amazed at how brilliant this (lesser known?) volume is. I'm a big fan of Muldoon too and was reading 'Hoodie-Skelp' a couple of days ago. He was a strange choice though for an anthology on animal poems. I must get a hold of the MacBeth book.
Thanks for reading (and for the recommendation)! You're right, a strange choice, though he does write a few himself.... I'm sure there's a few second hand copies of the MacBeth knocking around - I have a huge weakness for those paperback Penguin anthologies.
I enjoyed this, though I was puzzled that you might think the melting of Larkin's inner editor is illustrated by 'Mowing'. I think it's a fine poem. Also a hedgehog is certainly small -- but hardly furry. But I particularly liked that fox you know who sits under that window. Clearly, yes, a messenger between worlds. I think I've only written one animal poem myself, unless insects count, though there is a theory that every poet will write a bat poem sooner or later. But my bat poem was a butterfly.
Could there be a sub-genre in animal poems whose main aim is to be funny? And a sub-sub-genre in humorous animal lyrics, as in Flanders and Swann's unforgettable (to me and the generation before me) The Hippotamus Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9loVJsbBtI
Thank you for posting this Jeremy. Serendipitously, I was reading Hughes' 'Moortown Diary' just yesterday, continuously amazed at how brilliant this (lesser known?) volume is. I'm a big fan of Muldoon too and was reading 'Hoodie-Skelp' a couple of days ago. He was a strange choice though for an anthology on animal poems. I must get a hold of the MacBeth book.
Thanks for reading (and for the recommendation)! You're right, a strange choice, though he does write a few himself.... I'm sure there's a few second hand copies of the MacBeth knocking around - I have a huge weakness for those paperback Penguin anthologies.
I enjoyed this, though I was puzzled that you might think the melting of Larkin's inner editor is illustrated by 'Mowing'. I think it's a fine poem. Also a hedgehog is certainly small -- but hardly furry. But I particularly liked that fox you know who sits under that window. Clearly, yes, a messenger between worlds. I think I've only written one animal poem myself, unless insects count, though there is a theory that every poet will write a bat poem sooner or later. But my bat poem was a butterfly.
Could there be a sub-genre in animal poems whose main aim is to be funny? And a sub-sub-genre in humorous animal lyrics, as in Flanders and Swann's unforgettable (to me and the generation before me) The Hippotamus Song: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y9loVJsbBtI