'The poems radiate a sense of kinship with other species, along with sorrow for our trespasses against them.' Photo: Detail from book cover of Animal Prayers, by Randel McCraw Helms
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’.
Randel McCraw Helms has a particular feeling for elephants, whom he sees as sharing with us a capacity for grief. Not that his view of nature is sentimental – he knows that the female praying mantis eats her mate while he is still performing his ‘glad coital dance’: an illustration of the fact that ‘in the midst of life we are in death’. We humans may be forgiven for the way we ‘tread upon drowned sidewalk earthworms after rain’, but not so readily for having ‘made the sea cloacal’, so that mother orcas have to feed their young on befouled milk. The final poem, ‘A Prayer to Converse with Animals: in Honour of Greta Thunberg’, turns to the animals for forgiveness: ‘for the knife at the throat of the lamb, / For the tiger’s cage, the crushed / Testicles of the baited bull.’ The poem ends with a plea to the animals ‘to hold on, / Stay alive until humankind / Is finished, and imagine how graced / Their world could be / When we are gone.’
Some animals do enjoy a beneficial relationship with humans. Perhaps inevitably, Helms evokes St Francis, who converted the Wolf of Gubbio from his reprehensible habit of eating children, and negotiated a deal whereby the people of Gubbio fed the wolf in return for his forbearance. The wolf even comes to appreciate the miracle of the Mass: ‘I live by what dear Francis said: / It’s meat and blood, but tastes like bread.’ My favourite poem here is likewise overlaid with Christian imagery. ‘Koko goes to Heaven’ tells of the gorilla who learned American Sign Language. Helms imagines her instructing the inhabitants of gorilla heaven in the art, and bids readers: ‘Imagine manual choirs, a myriad / Innocent digits awave in unison, / Moving the nutritive empyreal air / With gales of unheard but understood song.’ Here is a new slant on Keats: ‘Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard / Are sweeter.’ Also perhaps a new slant on silent worship.
The poems abound in verbal wit and humour. They are to be treasured especially, though, for the compassion which pervades them and their sense of the spiritual unity of all the animal creation.
