Birds, Beasts and Flowers

Princess Grace of Monaco Published in aid of the World Wildlife Fund This beautiful book owes its origin to an invitation received by the late Princess Grace of Monaco from the American International Poetry Forum to give a poetry reading in the United States. John Carroll, who has devised many such programmes, made the selection of poetry and prose under the themes which he had chosen and which form the title. The programme was given its first performance at the Carnegie Hall in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania and then subsequently at St James's Palace, London, in 1978. In 1981, to commemorate the twentieth anniversary of the World Wildlife Fund, the Nottingham Court Press produced a limited edition of the selection with specially chosen illustrations. Princess Grace contributed a Foreword in which she said: 'It has always been my hope that this very beautiful selection of poetry and prose would find a permanent record in book form.' This edition brings the book to a much wider public at a reasonable price and retains all the beauty and original content of the limited edition. The artists represented include: Audubon, Bassano, Bravo, Brueghel, Reynolds, Sutherland and Wyeth. The poets and writers arc Martin Armstrong, William Blake, William Browne, Thomas Carew, James Dickey, Eleanor Farjeon, Robert Frost, Paul Gallico, Thomas Hardy, Seamus Heaney, John Heath-Stubbs, Gerard Manley Hopkins, Robinson Jeffers, Mary Kingsley, D.H. Lawrence, Edward Lear, Denise Levertov, Andrew Marvell, F.T. Prince, William Shakespeare, P.B. Shelley, Louis Simpson, James Stephens, Lord Tennyson, W.J. Turner and Walt Whitman. Princess Grace contributed one of her flower collage pictures and a story about St Francis of Assisi. This is a book to browse through and to treasure.