Poetry Editor's Note: We received a good many poems this year that featured birds, insects, and other critters and all they can symbolize to the human eye and ear. We're proud to present the best of those poems in this special poetry collection, "A Compendium of Beasts."
We like to think of it as a mini-beastiary - a little natural history, a bit of fable, a few humble moral lessons. Here follows new work from six poets on animals and such . . .
