David Beach
David Beach lives in Wellington. He has written four collections of sonnets, all published by Victoria University Press. He is currently working on a fifth collection.
Beach comments: ‘A zoo sequence obviously needs some poems with animals eating. But when, towards the end of the sequence, I came to write this group of poems, I never seemed to be able to get to the enclosures at feeding time. And the animals generally just seemed to lose their appetite at the sight of me. The sonnet about the dingo and how it teases the spectators by refusing to start its meal, rather sums up the state of mind I was put in, wandering about the zoo muttering under my breath ‘Eat, damn you, eat’.
‘And the baboon sonnet actually stems from a scene from one of my first visits to the zoo. Then when, to refresh my memory, a couple of times I tried to catch the baboons at feeding time again, of course I failed – probably just as well, with imperfect recollection quite a good substitute for imagination.’
