The Deepest Feeling (Animal Rights & Compassion-in Poetry and Photos)

The Deepest Feeling is a unique insight into animal rights and compassion by an Irish poet who has been an advocate for animals for four decades. The idea for the book materialized during Covid lockdown. Understanding how the situation for animals had deteriorated in the decades since he commenced his campaigning work, Gerry Boland decided to combine his passion for poetry with his sense of duty toward those billions of exploited and abused and slaughtered animals—in particular animal agriculture, animal experimentation, and sport and entertainment. The result is a book that contains forty-eight photographs, the majority taken from the not-for-profit We Animals archive, and forty-eight poems that Boland has composed as a personal response to each. The photos are thought-provoking but deliberately not overly bloody or gruesome. The poems are Boland’s personal, emotional responses to the images and are neither preachy nor overtly political. In composing the poems, Boland wrote what came to him as he took in and absorbed the image in front of him. What came out is a range of emotions.