ANIMAL SPIRITS IN THE NEW MILLENNIUM

Words, images, and songs commingle in this collection of poems and a fable, delivering an ode to the wisdom of fauna.

Mark Twain once said, “It is just like man’s vanity and impertinence to call an animal dumb because it is dumb to his dull perceptions.” For Twain, humans err when they assume that they have nothing to learn from animals. It’s a mistake Di Paolo assiduously avoids in his ambitious verse collection. For the author, animals are a repository of wisdom and insight, and he wants to give them voice so that readers might listen. The book opens with more than a dozen poems channeling the sagacity of a variety of beasts, from the owl to the wolf to the raven. These pieces are accompanied by starkly beautiful line drawings by Kidd. Here is part of Di Paolo’s poem on the beaver: “You, who were driven from the banks, / your precious furs / traded, wasted. / Forgive the age gilded / and fraught with unjustness. / Let a new chapter be written, / and a new story told / of unity, / and prosperity, / of the joining of minds and purpose.” Here and elsewhere in the potent volume, the animals chide us for objectifying them—and for forgetting that we are all part of one natural community. The author then offers a vision of that community in “A Forest Tale,” a prose fable that is the book’s capstone. In it, the animals that readers meet in the preceding poems aid a boy as he works through a quest for knowledge and self-realization. The story is not only a clever coming-of-age tale, but also, crucially, a portrait of humans and animals in productive conversation and coexistence. The boy’s maturation culminates with his becoming a composer (the book includes one page of sheet music for a song titled “1st Invention,” written by Di Paolo). The author’s message is clear: He wishes to promote literal harmony between human and beast.

A moving invitation to heed the voices of readers’ furred, feathered, and finned friends.