Rebecca Marjesdatter, Halloween 2023, The Owl Kingdom and other poems, crumbfairy press, Ruth Berman, 2809 Drew Avenue South, Minneapolis, Minnesota 55416, $4. Illustrations by Arthur Rackham and Moira Manion.
These charming mythic poems range widely in subject, from spiders to death to other arthropods, to goddesses, and of course to owls.
From "The Owl Kingdom":
The owls and ravens
have declared war.
...
Consider, should owls
drive ravens down from the forest,
into pastures and plowed land,
how will they guard their new possession
in the blinding day?
Not all of the poems are about animals acting like themselves, or acting a little bit like people. Some are about people acting exactly like themselves. From "Grimoire," which may be autobiographical:
"I believed
that if I read a book cover to cover
without missing a word or skipping
a single line ahead,
a spell would take me inside the tale"
Some books of poetry are themed and others are not. The Owl Kingdom does contain a lot of poems about animals (I count insects and other arthropods as animals), but quite a few seem to be about people and not about animals at all. Some are a little bit of both. If this book has a common thread uniting all its parts, it is a very personal approach to life on planet Earth. And I highly recommend it.
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