Maertz, Gregory: - The Charisma of Animals is Gregory Maertz's first volume of verse. Completed during the first two years of the COVID-19 pandemic, the poems presented here incorporate structural and sonic echoes of formalism in brief lyrics and longer narratives which seek to make transient, intensely personal experiences-love and loss, illness and recovery, encounters with nature and animals, history and works of art-concrete and accessible. They belong to the province of sensations, memories, dreams, and sacred places in Maertz's personal mythology: the fishing village of Gravir in the Outer Hebrides (home of Eriskay ponies, the eponymous white horses), the Hawaiian Islands, Lake Minnetonka, Manhattan, Heidelberg, Munich, Bergen, Paris, and Griggstown, an historic village on the outskirts of Princeton, New Jersey, where he makes his home with Hooksy, a big orange tabby, in a former cidery.