Cats and Their Poets

Cats are universally revered, worshiped and feared, evoking love and fascination in their hosts and companions. This delightful anthology of poems about cats, from the eighth-century Pangur Ban to the present, encompasses both the arcane and the familiar, the simple and the satisfyingly subtle. Cats and their Poets contains work by seventy-five writers, from Philip Sidney, Christopher Smart, Cowper, Keats, Rosetti, Dickinson and browning, through to Yeats, Don Marquis, Strachey, Sackville-West, Graves, MacNeice, Stevie Smith, Gavin Ewart, Hughes, Gunn, Silkin, Longley, Mahon, Ni Chuilleanain, Thomas Lynch and Vikram Seth. There are translations from Heine, Baudelaire, Verlaine, Mallarme, Valery and Apollinaire. These wonderful poems, selected and introduced by one of Ireland’s most respected men of letters, say as much about their enigmatic creators as they do of their mysterious muses. They will surprise, illuminate and comfort the reader in equal measure.