Birds and Other Beast

There is tremendous variety in form, theme, and tone in the

poems in this volume. Many of the poems may strike the

reader as corroboration of Thoreau's view of wildness and

wilderness because Peake's love of wild things forms his

poetic center, but this book also includes intense love poems

as well as celebrations of birds and trees and lightning bugs.

Though Peake celebrates nature, he does not view it with

sentimentality. He faces without tears a world in which one

creature preys upon another for survival, and he looks without

fear to the "revelry of the grave" when his form becomes food

for worms and feeds the laurel bushes growing over him.

According to critic John Lang, Peake's poems reveal "a poet

whose ear is attuned to the music of words" His poems abound

"in beautiful lines and images: 'The black-necked waders cry

in their wet fields, ' for example, and 'skies the white-faced ibis

soars.' Such lines embody in Fred Chappell's phrase, 'the eye's

joy.'" Like Peake's descriptions of finding a rare green kingfisher,

for readers of his poems, "Delight follows discovery."