All the Cats Are Gone

Peter Baltensperger is the editor and publisher of Moonstone Press and
the author of Arcana.

Growing up in the farming country of Southwestern Ontario, Lee had ample
exposure to a wide variety of cats and kittens. This collection of poems
pays homage to a long procession of pets and strays, toms and kittens,
hunters and mousers that has wandered in and out of the poet’s life
over the years.

As the title suggests, most of these poems are elegies—portraits of
cats once part of a rich and diverse farm and family life and now gone
forever, except in the poet’s memory. In many of the poems, the
various cats have been frozen at the moment of their demise—as if only
the event of sudden and often painful death had burned itself into the
observer’s mind, as if it were the moments of destruction that
mattered the most in the animals’ lives. And perhaps they did, in a
way, for many of the deaths occurred when the poet was a young boy, who
suffered with the victims and tried to come to terms with their
unexpected and violent fate.

Yet despite the violence of the described events, despite the morbidity
of much of the imagery, there is always a gentleness, a genuine caring
that permeates the poems. These are tender portraits, in many ways, of
an inscrutable species whose representatives have accompanied,
comforted, and puzzled their human “owners” from time immemorial. It
is the mystery of the cat as companion, pet, and enigma that Lee tries
to unlock with his portraits as he parades his cat friends and
acquaintances past the reader. He attempts to come to grips with what
constitutes a cat and what makes our relationship with these wonderful,
yet always puzzling, animals so full of intrigue and surprise.

Unfortunately, the numerous typographical and grammatical errors often
detract from the enjoyment of these otherwise very readable and
accessible poems.