Book excerpt: "Birds, Beasts, and Flowers! is the peak of Lawrence's achievement as a poet....The lucidity of his language matches the intensity of his vision; he can make the reader see what he is saying as very few writers can."--W. H. Auden D. H. Lawrence made his first great experiment in free verse in this collection of poems about animals and the natural world, published when he was thirty-eight. This Black Sparrow edition re-sets the text in the format of the first edition (New York: Thomas Seltzer, 1923) and restores several "indecent" lines suppressed by the original publisher. Lawrence's original jacket artwork is reproduced on the jacket in full color. In the words of the Academy of American Poets, "Lawrence believed in writing poetry that was stark, immediate and true to the mysterious inner force which motivated it. Many of his best-loved poems treat the physical and inner life of plants and animals; others are bitterly satiric and express his outrage at the puritanism and hypocrisy of conventional Anglo-Saxon Society."