Bestiary

Bestiary presents a gallery of beasts, from tigers, toads and tortoises to wasps and woodlice…from muggers and murderers to men who hide in shadows. A celebrated winner of fiction’s Orange Prize, Helen Dunmore is as spellbinding a storyteller in her poetry as in her novels. Here she enters the animal world, exploring our relation-ship with animals and confronting our own animal nature: what makes us hurt as well as what delights us, what makes us human. Helen Dunmore’s Bestiary brings beauty to the beast. As in her fiction, these haunting narratives draw us into darkness, engaging our fears and hopes in poetry of rare luminosity. The poems in her sixth Bloodaxe collection are probably her most lyrical, remarkable for their sensuous magic, their sharp delicacy, their sureness of touch.