The Great Cat Edited by Emily Fragos

Herewith a litter of tributes to the ever-fascinating, ever-mystifying cat. In this anthology poets across the continents and the centuries describe felines doing what they do best: sleeping, prowling, prancing, purring, sleeping some more, and gazing disdainfully at lesser beings like ourselves.

Here are Yeats’s Minnaloushe, Christopher Smart’s Jeoffry, Lewis Carroll’s Cheshire Cat, Blake’s ‘Tyger’ and Rilke’s panther. Here are contributions from Sufi mystics, medieval Chinese poets, and haiku masters of imperial Japan; from Chaucer, Shelley, Borges, Neruda, Dickinson and Shakespeare. Here are the cats of Mother Goose, and the one who wore the hat for Dr Seuss.

The Great Cat will delight cat lovers everywhere, celebrating as it does the beauty, the mystery, the gravity, the grace and, of course, the unassailable superiority of the cat.

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