Animal Prayers, by Randel McCraw Helms
Author: Randel McCraw Helms. Review by Joanna Dales
This little book will delight Friends of all stripes and is calculated to appeal especially to those who care about the relationship between humans and other animals. The poems radiate a sense of kinship with other species, along with sorrow for our trespasses against them. Some have an autobiographical flavour, like ‘Gull’, recounting the poet’s attempt to save the life of a seagull, victim of a traffic collision; or his visit to the vet to have the cat put to death: ‘“It was right to do this now”, I lied. / “Later we’ll be glad we did this now, I lied.”’ Others have a literary flavour, like the marvellous ‘Milton’s Seeing-Eye Dog’, told from the point of view of the dog who loves the blind poet as his daughters do not. The dog remarks that Milton did not go with his family to church, ‘preferring the silent Quakers, who were forbidden to meet’.
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