22INTRODUCTIONitself, that allows the animal to signify itself or bridges a gap between
observer and animal. This is a Platonic ideal—in a sense, it is a lyric with
an actual animal speaker, an actual birdsong for instance. But we can
allow that some poems express the desire to reach this impossible ideal,
while others clearly do not. Poems we might include in this more ideal
category, in addition to Hughes’s “The Jaguar” and “Second Glance at a
Jaguar,” are Elizabeth Bishop’s “The Fish,” James Dickey’s “Dog Sleeping
at My Feet,” Emily Dickinson’s “A Bird Came Down the Walk,” Maxine
Kumin’s “Sundays in March,” Christopher Smart’s “For I Consider My
Cat Jeoffry,” Robert Penn Warren’s “Caribou,” and James Wright’s “A
Blessing.” These are poems of encounter, of a deeply sympathetic attempt
by the author or speaker to register the specialness of the individual
animal, which I explore in chapter 4.
A means of filling in the gaps between these extremes of animal alle-
gory (which I explore in chapter 1) and the “pure” animal poem is sug-
gested by the taxonomic system itself, with its somewhat mysterious and
arbitrary modes of abstraction, beginning (or ending) with the category
of the animal and ending (or beginning) with individual specimens who
are members of a species, genus, or family. There are a surprisingly large
number of poems simply on the animal as a category, including “The
Animals,” by Australian poet Geoffrey Lehmann. These poems tend to
puzzle over the question of human-animal difference and similarity,
reminding us that we are animals and what has been gained or lost by
our collective failure to remember this fact. Such poems often do the
work that Coetzee’s own writing tends to do—to deconstruct differ-
ence and blur the boundary between human and animal—though they
can also do the opposite, reifying human-animal difference. I explore
this kind of poem in chapter 2. Then there are poems about kinds of
animals— birds, dogs, horses, snakes, farm animals, and predators—a
sort of folk taxonomy, which focus attention on larger orders in nature;
I explore these poems in chapter 3. There are poems, like many of those
by Ted Hughes and Pattiann Rogers, that attempt to define the species
itself (e.g., “The Tern,” “The Pike,” and “Justification of the Horned Liz-
ard”). Species poems in a sense mimic the interest of science in finding
fundamental patterns of life in the natural world, but they rely on a