Animal Songs

Exploring animals as creatures in their own right and as metaphors for the human experience, these 71 poems range in tone from foreboding to comical. With over 50 original illustrations by an accomplished artist and a full-color original cover, Animal Songs will set your mind humming with ideas and images and will make an appealing gift for lovers of animals and poetry alike. "Brilliant! Dan Liberthson's love of and empathy for animals lights up his poems as brightly as the feathers of a macaw." --Nancy Etchemendy, author of Cat in Glass, winner of the 2002 American Library Association, Best Book for Young Adults award "In these poems by Dan Liberthson, the reader is swept up on a journey through the world of animals--the wild, the tame, and the not-so-tame--encountering life, death, mythology, and the author's philosophy and insight into human relationships. Animal Songs is a charming book, with elegant phrasings and rhythms and lovely illustrations by artist Cassandra Mettling-Davis." --Alice Rogoff, Editor, Haight Ashbury Literary Journal; and poet, winner of the 2004 Blue Light Press Award This latest book of poems by Dan Liberthson reflects his love of animals, from ants to elephants. The sensitive writing reveals a deep understanding of animals in themselves and as metaphors for our human experience. Animal Songs captures a range of moods, from the serious, as in Intimations, in which a fantasy animal makes the writer aware of his own mortality, to the amusing, as in Bird Forms, shaped like birds' flight. Intended for mature and thoughtful adults, this is a book to savor." --Andrea Stenn Stryer, author of Kami and the Yaks, winner of the 2008 American Library Association Schneider Family Award for young children's literature