Animal instincts

Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems About Animals Ed. by Siobhan Harvey. Photo / Supplied

In a world of YouTube and nanoseconds, text messaging and curt emails, poems are still dug out to mark significant occasions such as death and marriage. Random House is establishing a series of exquisitely produced, astutely edited poetry anthologies that tap into universal concerns and rites of passage through the particulars of our lives.

Andrew Johnston's Moon-light gathers together some of the finest poems written by New Zealanders on the subject of death. In Swings + Roundabouts, Emma Neale has selected poems that form an essential manual on the joys and challenges of parenthood.

The latest treat is an anthology on animals. Animals have long been a staple choice for the poet who writes for children. Think of James K. Baxter's The Growly Bear, Spike Milligan's On the Ning Nang Nong or A.A. Milne's Us Two.

Apart from a children's book devoted to animals, creatures have seldom strayed into my poems and I was startled to see the roll-call of New Zealand poets who have embraced the furry and the feathered.

Siobhan Harvey has assembled a satisfying mix of poets, from the old to the new and from the north to the south. Harvey's anthology defies the pessimist's claim that the market is flooded with poetry anthologies. Quite the contrary.

A good anthology has the power to show off, both quietly and noisily, what poetry can do whether formally, technically, musically or in the light of the subject matter. It can send you greedily on the trail of the new voices, or wind you momentarily as you witness a familiar voice in a new light.

Our Own Kind is divided into six sections that include cats and dogs, crickets and bees, as well as sheep, sloths and the skeleton of the great moa. Sing-out-loud favourites such as Sam Hunt's Bow Wow poems and Denis Glover's The Magpies sit alongside the quirky wit of Cy Mathews' sentences and the unexpected sting in Sue Reidy's Ophidiophobia. Theme-based anthologies can widen our appreciation of a subject.

In this book, animals move, provoke and astound; we eat them and we wear them, we worship them and we caricature them, and we welcome them into our families. One of the standout poems, C.K. Stead's A Cow Is, seduces you with an initial, breathtaking cow image: "with bagpipes underneath/ fly-whisk at the back/ and at the front/ soft nose, beautiful eyes." By the time you reach the final stanza, Stead delivers a knife-in-the-gut moment and achieves the supreme dream of any poet, a poem that takes the reader on a journey that sticks.

Janet Frame's terrific sense of humour overturns the pity to be felt for the caged kea by audaciously pointing out how the kea might pity a human in The Kea Speaks from the Dunedin Botanical Gardens.

In a poem of consummate tenderness, For a Five-Year-Old, Fleur Adcock exposes the vulnerability of a mother who has "trapped mice and shot wild birds" alone, but who is "kind to snails" in the company of her child.

The appearance of animals may simply, but arrestingly, appear as metaphor as in Janet Charman's "My child's a limpet/ stuck asleep" or Jenny Bornholdt's "My father is a whale." Tracking the role of sound is a fascinating endeavour in any anthology and this book is no exception.

You can move from the lush pile-up of sounds in Jenny Argante's Rhinoceros to the colloquial charms of Glenn Colquhoun to the spare beauty of Brain Turner. One of the more striking examples is Greg O'Brien's stitch-bird poem where the words warble with glorious melody down the page.

The anthology is boosted by jazz-cool design and the poetry of Mark Smith's haunting photographs. Shot on a large format camera in black and white, the images release mood rather than prosaic documentation.

Our Own Kind: 100 New Zealand Poems About Animals
Ed. by Siobhan Harvey; photography by Mark Smith (Godwit/Random House $36.99)

* Paula Green is an Auckland poet and children's author.