“In poetry, as in life, animals bring out the best in us,” says Paul Muldoon; though a few mink and a few minke might chitter and dweeble their dissent, and there's a half-reclaimed dancing bear on the Mappin Terraces of London Zoo, who met a few men and did not bring out the best in them, in consequence of which she has little mad outbursts of robotic movement, like an old alcoholic shuffling and jiggling about Camden Town station just down the road. The Zoo, largely staffed by people in whom animals do bring out the best has set observes and optimistic caseworkers around her, to wheedle her back into bear humanity, and out of what they explain to visitors is no more than a particularly persistent bad habit, such as anyone might develop if they were forced to stand on hot plates. Cruelty to animals is the oldest racism; chucking a superfluous puppy or piglet on the fire the first joke, the first boast, the first act of prayer.

There's not too much in The Faber Book of Beasts about cruelty to animals, for or against: no John Peel and no weeping over sparrows, deliciae meae puellae; no little hunted hares (Ralph Hodgson, the Georgian animal-fancier, is not represented here); no dancing dogs or bears, except by implication in Robert Frost's lament over our own mind-forged manacles: “The world has room to make a bear feel free; / The universe seems cramped to you and me.”

This is a collection expressly designed to facilitate lucky accidents and felicitous juxtapositions; the poems are arranged not by author, nor by date, nor by species, but alphabetically by title. Hence the cloud of flies engendered by Blake and Lovelace and Holub, and a neighbouring Flea, on a romantic embassy (or pimping expedition) for Dirty Dean Donne: “It suck'd me first and now sucks thee.” Like far too many creatures, in and beyond these pages, these insects serve a human agenda; many are over-burdened with symbol like ill-used carthorses, or pushed too metaphorically far like all the dead nags between Ghent and Aix. (“How,” conveniently, takes its place behind the rest of the pack.) Likewise, “Pied Beauty” and Pied Piper call mysteriously to one another. The arrangement also brings an agreeable element of chaos; Thom Gunn's “Tamer and Hawk” keeps awkward company with “Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” and “This Little Piggy,” hardly an animal poem in any sense. Without (ideally) hypertext links, cross-references, or at the least a zoological index, you may not connect Chesterton's donkey “ears like errant wings” with Swift's self-deluded ass: “One fault he hath, is sorry for 't / His ears are half a foot too short.”

Any self-promoting ass can complain about omissions; I won't deplore the absence, say, of Dunbar's splendidly opaque depiction of the hedgehog (“hard hurcheon, hirpland, hippit as ane harrow, thy rigbane rattillis”) or Kingsley Amis's powerful “Shrimp in the Rubbish-Bin”: “I ask you, human beings all, / Was this the way to treat me, / To do to me what you have done / And then not even eat me?” It is fairer to regret the poems that are so perfunctorily biological that they don't earn their place: Eliot's Hippopotamus may be biting ecclesiastical mockery, but is not memorable as natural history. If Muldoon needed, a hippopotamus, I'd have preferred Belloc or Flanders. Likewise, Eliot's Jellicle cats are a verbal exercise only (Thom Gunn's Apartment Cats are much more feline), and the birds of Cape Ann no more than a twitcher's boast-list (“Leave to chance the Blackburnian warbler”). Herrick's “Captiv'd Bee” has a lot on its mind, but not apiculture. Lawrence looks at his snake with a fresh surprise, but is mainly there to show off his pyjamas and his sensibility; tortoises, at least baby tortoises, which don't provoke Lawrence's phallic anxiety, are more affectionately considered; bats (“disgustingly upside down / Hanging upside down like rows of disgusting old rags”) are beyond the narrow sweep of his sympathies. A Lawrentian character in Point Counterpoint derides Shelley for wanting his skylark to be spirit, not birdflesh, but his own bats Chiroptera never wert.

Children's vocabularies and literary imaginations are flooded with pictures of animals exotic and extinct, which is why it is so hard to see a camel afresh. It's remarkable how much zoo-sympathy is expressed and how little empathy, how little plain observation. Exceptions are the mad and a few moderns, preferably with the discipline of agricultural experience: Christopher Smart, John Clare, Gunn, Hughes, Heaney, Norman MacCaig. For the rest, the animal is an emblem, or a distorting mirror, a fabulous beast or a beast in a fable: “The mangled Frog abides incog, / The uninteresting actual frog: / The hypothetic frog alone / Is the one frog we dwell upon,” as Christina Rossetti bracingly points out. Auden's reindeer herds in “The Fall of Rome,” moving “silently and very fast,” are at best thrilling noises off. Walt Whitman, starting from Paumanok, flies like a bird in the first line of the extract; but thereafter merely lists seventeen states, and misspells Canada for some dark reason. Not much animal observation there, though his readiness to “look at them long and long” (or “sometimes half the day long” in the less ambitious version quoted here) could stand as an epigraph to the whole enterprise.

Sensible people don't review anthologies, since at some point you have to stop complaining about the dearth of good invertebrate poems (Marianne Moore's jellyfish is perilously close to the Kraken; Cowper and Lovelace celebrate the snail as an emblem of self-sufficiency, without tapping the metaphorical richness of its sex life) and instead celebrate what's new to you, and expose yourself to sneers. There's much to praise in this subtle and provoking collection, and I boldly admit I didn't know, or didn't remember, Thomas Flatman's “Appeal to Cats in the Business of Love” (“Only cats, when they fall / From a house or a wall, / Keep their feet, mount their tails, and away!”), Ciaran Carson's adaptation of Baudelaire (“Great Auk / Brought down to earth, his gawky, gorgeous wings impede his walking”), or Christopher Reid's funambulistic performance, “Two Dogs on a Pub Roof,” a hundred lines rhyming to one gruff woof, a rowdy growling Rottweiler of a poem.