CODA195attention that poets frequently give to animals. For example, John
Clare’s account of his careful approach to the bird in “The Nightingale’s
Nest” and his detailed description of the nightingale and its song reveal
the crucial fact that coming to know and care about animals involves
observing them over long periods of time, as hard as that may be.
Poetry demands similar degrees of sustained and careful attention.
As I wrote in my introduction, helping us develop our ability to pay
attention to animals in the world is the crucial work of animal poems,
and the crucial work of this book. Probably all poems about animals
can do this, but I am especially drawn to those poems that display and
develop our imaginative sympathy for animals, that express awe and
wonder, that reveal knowledge, and that help us acknowledge that other
animals also have a rightful place in the world. I will end with a poem
that does this work explicitly and well. It documents the careful obser-
vation of a single animal and generalizes about its kind, even as it
expresses deep skepticism about generalization. The poem implies that
human culture pays too little attention to animals, that it understands
animals as existing only to serve human needs and as expendable and
disposable when they do not. Most of all, the poem shows that simple
observation of animals should quickly convince us that animals have
sentience, intelligence, and self-regard. They also have some sense that
we are the creatures who most control their destinies and thus can
regard us with suspicion and disdain. And so, John Kinsella’s “Goat”:
Goat gone feral comes in where the fence is open
comes in and makes hay and nips the tree seedlings
and climbs the granite and bleats, through its line-
through-the-bubble-of-a-spirit-level eyes it tracks
our progress and bleats again. Its Boer heritage
is scripted in its brown head, floppy basset-hound ears,
and wind-tunnelled horns, curved back for swiftness.
Boer goats merged prosaically into the feral population
to increase carcass quality. To make wild meat. Purity
cult of culling made vastly more profitable. It’s a narrative.
Goat has one hoof missing—just a stump where it kicks