The Bestiary

“The textbook tells us that the frog lives a double life: between sea and land, between impossible distance and delayed arrival. See, those jumpy chubby reels of twitching slime, and this little pip below the chin; the first voice the universe heard, halved and inside-out.” “The Bestiary” is an astonishing debut collection of lyrical, intelligent poems which challenge the ways in which we respond to the natural environment around us. With subjects that range from sea-bound eels, lost hedgehogs and lonely butchers to a 17th-century autopsy, Chinese mythology and the flight patterns of snow geese, Sam Meekings’ poems explore both the instability and the small moments of epiphany in our complex and changing world.