Bats are still around for Hallowe'en, adding a ghostly touch to proceedings, but they will soon disappear into hibernation. This delightful collection of bat poetry will keep them fluttering in the mind through the winter nights.

It is astonishing how many poets have written about them. Ogden Nash wrote: “Myself, I rather like the bat,/It's not a mouse, it's not a rat”, and William Allingham: “Bat, bat, come under my hat,/And I'll give you a slice of bacon.” But most of the poets here seem fascinated rather than really fond of them.

Theodore Roethke is startled that “mice with wings can wear a human face”, Geraldine Green thinks their wings are “torn shreds of velvet ribbon”, George MacBeth describes them sleeping in their cave as “a snore of strap-hangers... without an Evening Standard between them”.

Ted Hughes uses his characteristic whirling imagination to describe them sympathetically — “as long as night lasts,” he writes:

The shuttlecock Bat
Is battered about
By the rackets of ghosts.

But in another poem full of intense, half-guilty feeling, he imagines himself as folding a bat's black wings around his wife, while she “grabbed for the world”. Some poets are more emphatically upset by bats. D.H. Lawrence took against a pipistrello that flew into his room in Italy and describes the epic battle to drive it out — a “thing with long, black-paper ears” that recoiled from “the horror of white daylight in the window!”

John Updike is appalled by bats living “in a glassed-in gloom” in the Central Park zoo — “small broken umbrellas that grab the air/like brown-gloved skeletal hands” — but says that he is determined to be “liberal and just” toward them.

One of the best poems is D.J.Enright's memory of a bat lying at the foot of a staircase at his Cambridge college. No one knew what to do, till a well-liked college tutor arrived and looked at it, when the bat “arose hangdog and teetered off”. The bat “recognised his authority. Like Lazarus”, Enright comments.

It is also interesting how the way that these poets write about bats unconsciously highlights their own characteristics — sentimental, frivolous, boring, moving, brilliant. The subject seems to be a catalyst for sorting them out as writers. It's amazing what bats can do!

On a Bat's Wing, edited by Michael Baron

Five Leaves Publications, £7.99; 128pp

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