Animal Library

"The Animal Library" marks the debut of a remarkable poet - a poet of the flesh, his own and that of the animals he has lived with all his life, whether real or imaginary. Jason Camlot's father was a furrier and he grew up in a world where, inevitably, "baby fur gets in your eyes" or in "your mouth". In dreams, the poet becomes a whale corpse "washed up / on a very pale beach / and hundreds of flies came, and people, to see the tusk / spun like coral glass." And as the boy grows up, images, at once curiously literal and yet surreal - images of being devoured or skinned alive - stay with him. The beauty of this collection is one of the mot juste, a concreteness and precision, coupled with a superb sense of rhythm.