Elmar imagines a man-animal continuum, an inclusive planetarity, wherein the animals are no longer taken as dumb and passive accessories of the human landscape. A whispering raven, with its “uncontrolled caw”, is not an “unfeeling thing”, it “croaks out orders”. The noises that birds make are messages of alarm. As sparrows chirp, and “the cock clicks its everlasting wattles”, a thunderstorm brews across the horizon. The poet cherishes the cock that “crows with four syllables”. Most rooster crows are of four syllables, and they sound like singing ‘happy birthday’. In Elmar’s poetry, ‘human standards’ often employed to measure animal sounds are challenged with a non-anthropocentric distance.… Lês fierder
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