A little less animal-oriented than I anticipated, assuming humans are not counted as animals. A bold assumption, that, but with a whale in the blurb and a seal on the cover my expectation was primed for a very specific exploration of loss. And that exploration is certainly there, and I think it's fair to say that the poems I liked best here were the ones that looked closely at nonhuman animals that were either struggling or extinct or on the verge of either, and how we interact with them. My favourites were "love poems when all the flowers are dead," about grief for dinosaurs; "52 hertz whale," about that poor lonely whale who can sing to none of its kin and have them comprehend it; and "marine snow," about the experience of ecological grief. Poems about the brief seasons of asparagus, while sympathetic, do not quite compare. But then that's the question, isn't it, and it's a question of scale: should loss deserve eulogy only when it is gigantic, on a species or ecosystem scale? Or do the small experiences of absence reverberate into a parade of personalised (depersonalised) isolations that mirror those enormous losses? Are we practicing for extinction? That is, I think, what Jane is asking... but even believing this, I still find the poems of the larger losses more affecting.