Poetry and Animals

108POETRY AS FIELD GUIDE

observations of animals were often from a distance—through the cul-
tural technology of books, pictures, zoos, and museums—and in part
because these poems are not lyric encounters but abstract descriptions
that strive for a kind of objectivity by discounting the value of any sin-
gle perspective or observation. The tension between the precision of her
nonce syllabic stanzas and the diffuse complexity of her sentences and
sources mirrors the tension between the seeming precision of a species
definition and its actual complexity as a community of individuals, or
of the relation between the artificial specificity of taxonomy and the
messiness of nature. Her poems about animals foreground the process
of classification, making the Borgesian point that the classes into which
we could place animals are endless. These poems acknowledge that spe-
cies have their own separate and unapproachable reality, even as the
poems translate that reality into human culture, creating original sym-
bolic relations to our world.
We can see these traits clearly in her stunning poem “The Jerboa,”
which begins with a seventeen-stanza account (titled “Too Much”) of
the use and meaning of various animals in ancient Roman culture, a
catalog of the complexity and range of ancient interest in animals for
art, food, and entertainment. For much of the poem, the reader proba-
bly has no idea what a jerboa is and what this animal has to do with the
carnivalesque material world of ancient Rome, in which menageries
were kept as displays of cultural conquest. These Romans could

build, and understood

making colossi and

how to use slaves, and kept crocodiles and put

baboons on the necks of giraffes to pick

fruit, and used serpent magic.

They had their men tie

hippopotami

and bring out dappled dog-

cats to course antelopes, dikdik, and ibex;