Onno Oerlemans explores a broad range of English-language poetry about animals from the Middle Ages to the contemporary world. Through careful readings of dozens of poems, Oerlemans demonstrates how poetry can sensitize us to the moral standing of animals and give us new ways to think through the problems of the human-animal divide.

Oerlemans Onno :

Onno Oerlemans is Professor of Literature and Creative Writing at Hamilton College. He is the author of Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (Toronto, 2002).Onno Oerlemans is professor of literature at Hamilton College. He is the author of Romanticism and the Materiality of Nature (2002).

Tobias Menely, University of California, Davis:
Oerlemans is an insightful reader of poetry’s “negative capability,” its anti-solipsistic investigation of the existential entanglements that spill over the borders of self and species. This splendid book makes a convincing case that poetry has much to teach us about both the ‘animal’ as an unstable category that haunts human self-conception and the astonishing diversity of nonhuman life-worlds. It is particularly incisive as a meditation on how thinking typologically, about genres and species, may deepen our attention to the individual existence of a poem or animal.

Anat Pick, Queen Mary University of London:
Animals are present in many poems and key to the development of poetic form, yet relatively little has been written about their formative place in poetry. Poetry and Animals redresses the lack of attention to poetry within animal studies and highlights the essential role of our fellow creatures in the history of poetry.

Susan McHugh, University of New England:
Oerlemans interrogates how poetry, as a specific form of writing, “reveals tendrils of meaning about animals that other kinds of writing and thinking do not.” His astonishing close readings of choice examples illuminate how poetry sustains a productive ambiguity and openness in the representation—which always involves interpretation—of animals. Great for anyone teaching, writing about, or even just trying to pay attention to animals.

Philip Armstrong, author of What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity:
Onno Oerlemans’s Poetry and Animals represents an important contribution to the scholarship on animals and human-animal relations in literature. We badly need some excellent work on poetry from a human-animal studies perspective, and this book provides a provocative, erudite, thoughtful, and engaging contribution.