I loved this book, and also I don't know if I can recommend it to anyone. I mean, maybe there are a few people who enjoy reading poetry. But poetry from the early 1800s about rural life in England? Poetry that RHYMES? Poetry with delicate descriptions of different kinds of nests and bird noises and the movement of frogs and snakes and fish, interrupted by dirty limericks and paranoid denunciations as the poet goes mad.

What, no takers?

But I was so moved by John Clare and his poems that focus closely on the details of other species and waterways. These are also political poems, a denunciation of enclosures and landowners. Poems mourning particular trees and streams who have been murdered. Poems that are so relevant right now, even with the old-fashioned cadence, rhyme, creative spellings and long-lost peasant words.

When Clare describes a poet, he shows that his main quality is an interest in small and unloved creatures, and a hatred of the culturally-sanctioned cruel ones who wantonly destroy them. Reading these words strengthened that impulse in me: notice these others, recognize they have their own perspective, cherish them, through whatever comes.