Zoologies: On Animals and the Human Spirit

by Alison Hawthorne Deming

Humans were surrounded by other animals from the beginning of they were food, clothes, adversaries, companions, jokes, and gods. And yet, our companions in evolution are leaving the world—both as physical beings and spiritual symbols—and not returning. In this collection of linked essays, Alison Hawthorne Deming asks, and seeks to what does the disappearance of animals mean for human imagination and existence? Moving from mammoth hunts to dying house cats, she explores profound questions about what it means to be animal. What is inherent in animals that leads us to destroy, and what that leads us toward peace? As human animals, how does art both define us as a species and how does it emerge primarily from our relationship with other species? The reader emerges with a transformed sense of how the living world around us has defined and continues to define us in a powerful way.

Genres: Nonfiction, Animals, Essays, Nature, Environment, Natural History, Science

234 pages, Paperback

First published October 14, 2014

About the author

Poet and writer Alison Hawthorne Deming was born in Hartford, Connecticut, in 1946. She earned an MFA from Vermont College and worked on public and women’s health issues for many years. A descendant of the American novelist Nathaniel Hawthorne, Deming is native to New England, but has studied and taught in many other regions as an instructor and guest lecturer. Her books of poetry include Science and Other Poems (1994), winner of the Walt Whitman Award from the Academy of American Poets. Praising the volume, judge Gerald Stern wrote: “I greatly admire Alison Deming’s lucid and precise language, her stunning metaphors, her passion, her wild and generous spirit, her humor, her formal cunning. I am taken, as all readers will be, by the knowledge she displays and how she puts this knowledge to a poetic use; but I am equally taken—I am more taken—by the wisdom that lies behind the knowledge.” The collection, described by Deborah DeNicola in the Boston Book Review as “a dense, majestic, wise and ambitious book,” is listed among the Washingon Post’s Favorite Books of 1994 and the Bloomsbury Review’s best recent poetry.

Deming’s other poetry collections include The Monarchs: A Poem Sequence (1997), Genius Loci (2005), and Rope (2009). Genius Loci was praised by D.H. Tracy in Poetry: “Alison Deming’s title means ‘spirit of place,’ but be warned . . . Deming doesn’t belong, or want to belong, to a single place long enough to find its genius, and so she functions more like a naturalist of naturalism, classifying the spirits of place as she encounters them.”

In addition to numerous journal and anthology publications, Deming has published works of nonfiction, including Temporary Homelands (1994), a collection of essays, The Edges of the Civilized World (1998), and Writing the Sacred into the Real (2001). She also edited Poetry of the American West: A Columbia Anthology (1996), and co-edited, with Lauret E. Savoy, The Colors of Nature: Essays on Culture, Identity, and the Natural World (2002; second edition 2011).

Deming is the recipient of a Wallace Stegner Fellowship and fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, and the Arizona Commission on the Arts. She has received the Pablo Neruda Prize, a Pushcart Prize, and the Gertrude B. Claytor Award from the Poetry Society of America. She is a professor of creative writing at the University of Arizona and lives in Tucson.

Reviews

[Peacegal · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a beautifully-written collection of meditations on the natural world, and how it inspires and enriches the human experience. The author seems to be both attuned to and fascinated by animals ranging from the mightiest denizens of the African plains to the most humble backyard insects. For those involved in humane work, it is a reminder that there is not just the suffering and injustice we see front-and-center in our newsfeeds and inboxes every day—but also astonishing beauty, wonder, and intelligence in the animal experience.

Any time I encounter an author whose appreciation of animals seems to be deeper and more complex than just simply thinking dogs are cute, I can’t help but wonder about their dietary choices. Especially when the author writes, as Deming does, a line like this:

Anyone who is not feeling sorrow in contemplating the plight of animals, and the hand of humans in furthering their plight, is not paying attention.

So I naturally found myself deeply disappointed when the author, like so many other professed animal lovers, can embrace the sentience and individuality of nearly every other creature, but has a huge black hole when it comes to those who end up on the dinner plate. After writing about a pig who she raised and then had killed for her flesh, the author writes:

So it is not only for the meat that I owe gratitude to the pig, but also for the web of connection to my neighbors.

The pig didn’t want gratitude. She wanted to live. The author made this abundantly clear when she described how the pig raged against her slaughter, as all healthy young animals do, bucking as the slaughterman rode her around the pen like around like a bronco before he could stab her throat with a knife. Isn’t there a better way to befriend your neighbors than taking a life? Isn’t there a better way to feed yourself when you have a choice?

Like many children, the author’s own daughter knows instinctively that all of this is wrong.

"I'm not eating it!" my daughter screamed in the fury of a five-year-old who knows an injustice when she sees it.

Elsewhere in the book, the author writes about visiting slaughter-bound pigs on an artisan Vermont teaching farm. She writes about how each male piglet is castrated without painkillers, as is the industry standard. She lamely seems to excuse this by saying it’s done “quickly.” Yet how many of us would accept anesthesia-free surgery on our own dogs and cats, even if done “quickly?” At the same farm, she speaks with the farmer about how kids are brought in to help slaughter chickens, at first nobody wants to take a life but by the end of the day most think it's “fun.” We really need to stop and ask ourselves: is this the world we want? The future we want? Or do we want to raise the next generation of innovators who find better ways of producing healthy and humane food?

[Snap · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the words of Deming, "The book began with a series of short pieces written at the invitation of Peter Blaze Corcoran for the inaugural Rachel Carson Distinguished Lecture Series on Sanible Island, Florida, in 2004. The theme was "The Ethics of Sustainability"... I knew I could not imagine sustainability without imagining a place for animals in both the material and the spiritual world, and so the work began." This is how Zoologies was born. Animals and the human spirit. From crows, ants, poetry in Brazil and bird song, storks making their flight from North Africa to Spain and the hieroglyphics of Egypt, dog tags, dragon, cats, oysters and rabbits on Mars. Stories of animals and man .. the connections, the loss. Technology and in Deming's words: "The question is not whether we can live without technology, but whether we can live with technology in such a way that we do not destroy ourselves and the planet." This is the kind of book that I want to write in, make notes, take a highlighter and mark the passages I found important to me. It goes on the KEEP shelf.

[Stefanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

It's easy to see why Deming's Zoologies was a nonfiction finalist for the 2015 Orion Book Award. Each chapter of this book is an essay exploring a different connection between humans and non-human animals with great insight and expertly precise language, and though there is lamentation, there is also hope. For me, one of the most powerful moments of the book was toward the end when Deming wrote, "Ten thousand years from now, I want someone to say of us, 'What amazing courage they had, and what spirit. How smart they were, how inventive—and how profoundly they must have loved Earth.'"

I had the pleasure of meeting Alison when she visited Iowa State earlier this year, and she signed my book with this inscription: "In hopes this work feeds your own—" Such simple words, such a simple hope, and it couldn't have been more realized.

Read it!

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I wasn't sure about this at first. The sections felt too short, winding, and unfinished, and I was expecting more nature writing. But I soon grew to appreciate the beatiful way this book weaves in and out of nature, of memoir, of the spiritual, of the human. Each chapter, though seemingly separate and distinct, builds to form one narrative. A lovely, harshly honest look at the human spirit and how we connect ourselves with the world around us.

[Linnie Greene]

Review forthcoming in Shelf Awareness.

[Kali · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not my fave of this genre!

[Dr. Sabrina Molden · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was almost perfect for someone like me. It included new learning, one of my favorite things; the facts about animal nature were fascinating. Then there’s the writing. The essays were the perfect length and eloquently written to the point my mouth was wide open in awe at the end of them. Lastly, it was partly memoir and I really like her and related to her. I want to be her friend. The themes were a repetitive towards the end though.

[John LaPine · Rating 4 out of 5]

collections of essays, each explicitly about an animal. easy read. a few border on cheesy (one as a letter composed by Curiosity on Mars, which breaks the theme), and each essay lands in kind of the same way, with a revelation or epiphany, which is occasionally deep, occasionally left me wanting more (good feeling but some felt simply underdeveloped). liked this one on the whole.

[Deb Stransky · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting book. Enjoyed the comparison of animal behavior and human behavior. She wrote about behaviors that I was not aware of in the animal world. The only thing I did not like is she started with the comparison then the last part was just human issues.

[Keygan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great range of essays. I absolutely loved some of them, found all of them interesting. Beautiful prose and a great variation of perspectives on human and animal connections.

[Amber · Rating 5 out of 5]

First book of the year! Beautiful. Tragic. Haunting. Wonderful. Her essays on what animals mean to us are stunning!

[Mark Castaneda · Rating 3 out of 5]

some incredible lines, but some of it was forced in that it wasn't always well written and constructed, but just a flowing pen of passion. doesn't translate as well as essays as it might as poems

[Amy · Rating 4 out of 5]

Non-Fiction finalist for 2015 Orion Book Award. Essays about humans and animals. Beautiful, beautiful writing though sometimes the essays seem to cut off before the thought is really complete. Human relations with animals are often so hideous it can be hard to read about. (see: The Sixth Extinction by Elizabeth Kolbert, also a finalist for the 2015 Orion Book Award).

[Ken Lamberton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautiful and lyrical with astounding insights into the wild and the human.

[Kerri · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was fine - another one for school so I wouldn't have picked it on my own. Didn't finish because I didn't have time, but probably won't go back to finish.