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The Animal Library
The Animal Library marks the debut of a remarkable poet – a poet of the flesh, his own and that of the animals he has lived with all his life, whether real or imaginary. Jason Camlot’s father was a furrier and he grew up in a world where, inevitably, “baby fur gets in your eyes” or in “your mouth.” In dreams, the poet becomes a whale corpse “washed up/ on a very pale beach/ and hundreds of flies came,/ and people,/ to see the tusk,/ spun like coral glass.” And as the boy grows up, images, at once curiously literal and yet surreal – images of being devoured or skinned alive – stay with him. The beauty of this collection is one of the mot juste, a concreteness and precision, coupled with a superb sense of rhythm.
“…Camlot’s graphic exactness adds to the power of his vivid, animated images.” — Betty Goodwin “…Camlot’s style is rich and telling, taking us from smutty Chicago to ancient Greece, from the 19th century Decadents to modern biological polemics.” — Hour, 2001 “These poems are satisfyingly grisly and ornate, and funny in the sinister way that dreams are sometimes funny Toe-curlingly delightful.” — Broken Pencil “This work has Kafkaesque reverberations and a rich awareness of the evocative power of sight, sound and smell and moves from the prehistoric to the present while displaying a strong sense of European myth and history intermingled with a heady eroticism.” — Rampike Magazine “Rich in ideas and wit, unique and prodigious in its imagery.” — Books in Canada
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