Amphibious Horses: Beings in the Littoral and Liminal Contact Zones

Horses galloping in littoral zones are represented as embodying wildness, freedom and a prelapsarian quality. Roy Campbell’s ‘The Horses of the Camargue’ includes themes which recur in texts about littoral horses: the romanticising segue between the horses and the environment they inhabit, the ramifications of wild horse and human entanglement and the unavoidable loss of littoral equine ‘freedom’ when he is trained and/or taken from the sea. Yet Campbell’s poem is dedicated to AF Tschiffely who rode two Criollo horses from Buenos Aires to Washington in 1925. If horses, generally, who cross boundaries between the wild and the tame, answer to those parts of ourselves which long for an uncomplicated connection with wildness, they also embody the potential for cross-species relationships based on training. Wolraad Woltemade’s horse exemplifies equine trusting of a rider; Edwin Muir’s poem, ‘The Horses’, stresses their desires for human connection. This paper will then take a serendipitous journey in the company of threshold beings who whinny littorally through childhood adventure stories, Misty of Chincoteague, and Big Black Horse, and the more sombre tale, The Homecoming, to fetch up on the edges of a dam in Tokai where a herd of horses, and one in particular, surpass youthful fable. Horses are luminous beings who exist liminally as well as literally— in personal myth and in grounded, horse-human relationships on the sandy dressage arena as they teach the rider the stability to connect symbol and ‘reality’, heaven and earth.Department of HE and Training approved lis

[Review] Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, editors. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 2019. 559 pp.

[Review] Lynn Turner, Undine Sellbach and Ron Broglio, editors. The Edinburgh Companion to Animal Studies. Edinburgh University Press, 2018, 2019. 559 pp

[Review] Francesca Mackenney. Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 244 pp. ISBN 9781316513712

[Review] Francesca Mackenney. Birdsong, Speech and Poetry: The Art of Composition in the Long Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2023. 244 pp. ISBN 978131651371

Poem: Talking to Jasper, in the garden

Poem by Wendy Woodward

[Review] Matthew Calarco. The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 170 pp. ISBN9780231194730

[Review] Matthew Calarco. The Boundaries of Human Nature: The Philosophical Animal from Plato to Haraway. New York: Columbia University Press, 2022. 170 pp. ISBN978023119473

[Review] Carol Gigliotti. The Creative Lives of Animals. New York University Press, 2022. 289 pp. ISBN 9781479815449

[Review] Carol Gigliotti. The Creative Lives of Animals. New York University Press, 2022. 289 pp. ISBN 978147981544

[Review] David Brooks, The Grass Library. Brandl and Scheslinger, 2019. 223pp

The Grass Library constitutes its own genre – a memoir of embodied humans and animals who write themselves not quite equally into the text – the nonhuman takes precedence. On the cover, fittingly, the human is an absence although there is evidence in the background, full bookshelves and a water bowl lovingly placed on a window shelf. In the foreground is one of the principal subjects, an assertive presence who gazes directly at the viewer with sheep-openness and beauty. Brooks mentions an antiquarian library elsewhere that had been subjected to ‘the scrutiny of grass’ (65). This book too has been scrutinised by grass, by nonhuman ways of being, by their narratives and their desires. If this book was originally conceptualised as part of a project ‘exposing animal cruelty’ (16) it is also a celebration of transpecies love and of living together. It is a book about writing ethically about animals, and what the process of writing reveals

[Review] Maren Tova Linett. Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human. New York University Press, 2020. Crip: New Directions in Disability Studies. 213 pages.

[Review] Maren Tova Linett. Literary Bioethics: Animality, Disability, and the Human. New York University Press, 2020. Crip: New Directions in Disability Studies. 213 pages

[Review] Krishanu Maiti, editor. Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals. Springer, 2021. Second Language Learning and Teaching: Issues in Literature and Culture. 188 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-76159-2 (eBook)

[Review] Krishanu Maiti, editor. Posthumanist Perspectives on Literary and Cultural Animals. Springer, 2021. Second Language Learning and Teaching: Issues in Literature and Culture. 188 pp. ISBN 978-3-030-76159-2 (eBook

Canine embodiment in South African lyric poetry

This article discusses South African lyric poetry in English including translations since the 1960s. Rather than being private statements, South African lyrics, like all lyrics, are essentially dialogic—in relation to the philosophical, the political or the psychological. The poems examined here are in dialogue with dogs, their embodiment, their subjectivities, their contiguities with humans. This article considers how trans-species entanglements between human and canine, whether convivial or adversarial, manifest poetically in myriad ways in gendered and/or racialised contexts and analyses how the vulnerabilities of both humans and dogs are made to intersect. Ruth Miller portrays dogs as divine creations who are uncertain and “embarrassed”. Ingrid Jonker’s poems intertwine human and canine, foregrounding gendered vulnerabilities. Where dogs are figured metonymically, entanglements of human and dog break down binary categorisations, in Jonker’s poems as well as in those of other poets. Mongane Wally Serote’s creatural humans, for example, seem both animal and human. Oswald Mtshali figures dogs within apartheid structures as antagonists, protectors or savage scavengers. More recent poems, influenced perhaps by new thinking about the animal subject, imagine dogs in compassionate interspecies connections. Many of these recent elegiac poems, in particular those by Jenna Mervis and Harry Owen, are attentive to beloved dogs but without sentimentality or the imposition of an anthropocentric focus