Woodland characters come to life

With spare and lovely language, Bill Griffin captures the personalities of creatures as surely as his wife, Linda French Griffin, brings them to life with her delicate line drawings, each framed by a circle bearing the scientific name of the animal.

“Back off, Two-legs” grunts the wild boar.

I can see you ain’t packing heat so get out of my face.

Even without the line-drawing on the facing page, this bully comes to life. Like that of each animal in this irresistible book of poems, the boar’s voice is unique.  He’s in your face. “Do you think I give a damn / for your fences?” he says.

Such a tone is impossible to imagine for the business-like raccoon, who brags that she is “the cleverest in the forest” or for the smug, little mouse detailing his techniques for stealing from “Big Brain,” or for the millipede with her “thousand left feet.”

This collection of poems was inspired by the animals on Snakeden Mountain in Avery County, so named by the Cherokee because snakes wintered there in its rocky caves. Bill Griffin, a physician by trade, has long led a summer backpacking adventure for teenagers through High Adventure Camp. With Mike Barnett (the only two-legged creature to rate a poem in the book), he spent a week with one of these groups on Snakeden Mountain in 2007. Linda French Griffin is an artist and historian whose work has focused on the natural world in Europe and America in the late Middle Ages. The Griffins shaped the book in the tradition of the medieval bestiary, which was a collection of stories about the natural world.

Like those medieval bestiaries, these poems and illustrations bring a little slice of  earth to life with vivid language and luminous images. The animals are by turns humorous, mischievous, frightened, or generally disgusted with human kind (or even occasionally each other:  see Raccoon’s dismissive comments on Skunk). They remain true to their kind — Snake swallows Mouse, Hawk devours Rabbit. But not one of them sounds like any other. Even the shape of the poem on the page suggests the animal it depicts.

And so, the Griffins invite us in to participate in an intimate view of life among the animals. Even Mike, the two-legged one, says when his turn comes:

Friends, whatever small gifts I have to give

are yours...

The collection begins and ends with the voice of the Raven. He warns at the beginning:

Listen.

I’m not going to say this twice.

The last illustration shows the raven flying high over the mountain. He closes with these words:

I will spread my soul of wings

where they cast no shadow

and invite you to join me as part

and presence

of Snake Den Ridge.”

Snake Den Ridge: A Bestiary,by Bill and Linda French Griffin.Greensboro: N.C. March Street Press, 2008.