Wild and domesticated beasts paraded alongside pets and pests when we considered ‘animals’.
In Edwin Muir’s much-anthologised ‘The horses’ they arrive to help mankind recover from apocalyptic disaster. In contrast, the horses in Philip Larkin’s ‘At grass’ are enjoying their retirement. Edwin Morgan celebrates a horse culture in ‘A Mongol saying’.
We also heard Morgan’s ‘Wolf’ in which he imagines its re-introduction to Scotland.
The exiled Malawian Jack Mapanje employs African folk tale traditions to call out government oppression. We heard ‘The lies we tell about the elephant’ and ‘Return of the rhinoceros’.
Norman MacCaig’s ‘Starling on a green lawn’ inspires several brilliantly apt comparisons – how about ‘like a mad glove’! The same poet sees some amusing qualities in ‘Frogs’, whereas Seamus Heaney’s ‘Death of a naturalist’ the young poet is terrified by a gathering of the ‘great slime kings’. Heaney’s ‘The names of the hare’ (his translation of a Middle English poem) is a Rabelaisian celebration of its many magical nicknames.
Ted Hughes ‘Sheep II’ depicts the distress of the lambs unable to recognise their shorn mothers. His ‘View of a pig’ is a typically unsentimental observation of a slaughtered animal. Chris Short’s ‘The beast chapel’ imagines that curious cows have wandered into a ruined barn. You can read it here.
‘The donkey’ in G K Chesterton’s poem is unbowed by the ridicule heaped on him.
We had three amusing poems from Attila the Stockbroker’s collection ‘The rat-tailed maggot’; the title poem, plus ‘The slug’ and ‘The axolotl’. This last is reminiscent of Ogden Nash, whose ‘The Cassowary’ was recited from memory, as was the anonymous limerick ‘The lady of Riga’.
Moving from big cat to small, we had a short extract beginning ‘For I will consider my cat Geoffrey’, from Christopher Smart’s ‘Jubilate agno’; a loving litany of his cat’s activities.
In ‘My cat and i’ Roger McGough’s companion helps him get over the loss of successive girlfriends. Jehuda Amichai’s ‘A dog after love’ is very different in tone; a startling end to the evening’s readings.