In Praise of Cats: An Anthology

Sparling Mills was a freelance reviewer living in Herring Cove, N.S.

In Praise of Cats is the type of book one would give as a gift to a cat-lover. Dorothy Foster has chosen 75 poems about cats written by poets of England, America, Greece, France, Arabia, and Japan. The wisdom of her choices varies in long poems from the excruciatingly boring “The Kitten and Falling Leaves” by Wordsworth to the delightfully irreverent “mehitabel s extensive past” by Don Marquis (1878-1937). Usually the shorter poems are better poetry: for example, Carl Sandburg’s famous “Fog” and W.B. Yeats’s “The Cat and the Moon.” Unfortunately, many of the selections are marred by an excess of rhyming couplets and/or a pompous moral at the end.

The illustrations by Alan Daniel contribute much to the attractiveness of the book. The cover is draped with a lusciously furry gold-black cat posing on a shocking-pink pillow. Inside, there are 29 black-and-white brush paintings. Perhaps the most successfully charming pages in the book are pages 58 and 59, facing each other, with pictures illuminating two delicate haiku.

Foster arranges the poems into groupings as follows: The Proud Mysterious Cat, The Hungry Cat, The Hunter, The Curious Cat, The Kitten, Rhymes And Ballads, The Tomcat, The Lover, The Friend, Epitaph. The Tomcat grouping is the most fun, mainly because it is not as overwhelmingly certain that cats are perfect. But for the most part, Foster carries her admiration of the feline almost to idolatry. The last sentence of her Introduction reads, “The poet’s steady vision of the cat as individual, friend, and object of beauty will not waver.” As a poet who dislikes cats, I am not convinced.