Writing A First book of Animals was a holiday from the other sorts of writing I do. No
plots to worry about, no characters to invent, no story line required to lace
all the facts together. All I had to do was create a series of vivid snapshots
in words of animals that I love. Complete work BLISS!
I wanted
each poem to be a fresh and clear as possible - so that readers would be
captivated by creatures they’d never heard of before and see familiar animals
in a new way. That meant getting my brain to work as flexibly and as playfully
as possible. So, as well as reminding myself of the facts about each animal, I
did a LOT of staring into space and letting ideas romp around inside my head.
As a child,
I was lit up by the blackbirds and frogs and hedgehogs in our back garden;
animals far away, that I read about or saw on the TV, gleamed and glittered in
my imagination. The wonderful thing about Petr’s illustrations is that they all
glow with that heart-shine - they aren't simply beautiful images, they are full
of emotion and reflect what animals look like inside me, where they are the
stars of my heart.
I hope our
book passes on a love of nature to a new generation and helps them to
experience the joy of holding close the beauty and wonder of living things.
Something about a few of the poems
Blue Whale
I’ve seen
blue whales in the wild and been close to them in a boat half their length.
When they breathe, its amazing; the sound carries a long way, especially on a
still, calm day. It sounds almost like steam escaping from a vast metal
pressure cooker - you can hear the great interior space from which the air has
come. Sometimes, the sound of the blow is the first indication you have that
there is a whale out there. You hear the sound, turn to look and there is that
long long smooth back slicing through the water.
Giraffes
I was once
in Nakuru National park in Kenya in a very small car cos I couldn't afford a
landcover. A giraffe came and drank from a puddle beside my car. It splayed its
legs to reach down and get to the water and as at straightened up, it stopped
and peered in through the car window. I got a fabulous close up view of those
lovely eyes, and long eyelashes and the most disdainful expression in the whole
of Africa!
Beaver Dam
I was
fascinated by beavers as a little kid. I finally got to see their dams when I
went to Alaska, about 25 years ago. The first thing that you think when you see
a beaver dam is that it looks as if it was human made. The structure is so
clever, so well thought out, that it isn't something you imagine an animal
making. The thing that struck me most was a line of sticks, pushed into the mud
vertically to strengthen one edge of the dam; they were placed at such regular
intervals they looked as if they had been measured with a ruler.
Orang Utan
Nest Building
I was in
Borneo a couple of years ago and was lucky enough to see wild Orangs along the
Kinabatangan river. Last one afternoon we watched an old male make his bed for
the night in a tree close to the water’s edge. He was incredibly strong and
bent branches thicker than my arm as if they were stakes of grass. The
construction looked so lazy, so laid back that you didn't notice until it was
lamest done, how cleverly he had used the shape of the tree and the leaves and
branches around him. He finished his nest with a canopy of leaves even though
it was a perfectly beautiful afternoon. Back in my hotel a few miles away, I
woke at two to the sound of rain pelting on the roof. It was nice to go back to
sleep knowing that the orang had known the rain was coming and would be as dry
in his bed as I was in mine.
Fireflies
There are
many sorts of fireflies all over the world. We have glow worms in the UK - not
worms but female beetles that glow to call to their mates - they still survive
in some pl;aces and are magical. On the same trip to Borneo we went out on the
river at night and saw fireflies on a big scale - half a mile of riverside trees
were simply covered with them. They flashed on and off more or less together,
rather as if the trees were covered with a massive set of fairy lights
connected to a couple of dodgy plugs.
The
Nightingale and the humpbacked Whale
When I was
pregnant with my son, who is now almost 30, we lived in a house where I could
hear nightingales from my bedroom window. I would open the window on cold early
May nights and listen to the wonderful sound of their song gurgling through the
darkness under there stars. In Italy this year I heard nightingales again,
singing in the moonlight in the Abruzzi mountains. Bird song and humpback
whales song have more in common than you might imagine - speed whale song up
and it sounds like bird song. Somehow birds and whales are using the same rules
of composition even if their instruments are many octaves apart! It took me 34
years to hear humpbacks singing on their breeding grounds after studying them
on the summer feeding grounds in Newfoundland when I was doing my degree. Its a
sound I definitely want to hear again, so Im going to try and get to Hawaii or
French Polynesia to hear them sing.
We asked Nicola 5 questions about making the book...
Check out
some more artwork from the book, featured in The Guardian gallery.
Next week we'll be going behind the scenes with illustrator Petr Horacek and finding out more about his process of drawing the animals. We'll also have a competition to win signed copies of the book!
Next week we'll be going behind the scenes with illustrator Petr Horacek and finding out more about his process of drawing the animals. We'll also have a competition to win signed copies of the book!
A First Book of
Animals is the second title in Nicola Davies' First Book series,
following the bestselling A First Book of Nature.
Pick up a copy in your local bookshop.
