Blue-bird sings the Blues is contemporary lightning-strike poetry that illuminates the roots and routes of animal abuse. All aspects of such abuse is covered within the broad range of animal rights.The themes span every point that flows through the rivers to the whirlpool ocean and across the choppy sea of capturing animals for our own purposes, be it to use or abuse or consume.The connection between prejudice towards people and animals is explored in the poetry which contrasts racism and sexism and speciesism. Subjects that are hard-hitting are not shied away from, but instead are met head-on.Animal Rights is the constant theme when the poems examine the abuse within abattoirs, by ritual slaughter, in zoos as well as the casual abuse by those who profess to be 'animal lovers' while gorging on their flesh camouflaged as meat. Religion is addressed as it is not a friend of animals.A Crush on the Movies deals with the core of cruelty at the raw edge of our society. Once read it will be equally tough to erase the multiple-images from your mind.There are a few quirky articles within the text that are not poems, but deal with a point that resonates throughout the text. One that might tickle your natural funny bone is The Lawyer who loved Lager.Then again the odd poem might cause you to stop in your tracks and perhaps reflect on your activity.While here and there it might appear the wet markets are targeted, that is intended and real. For they touch the laobaixing [common people] who are victims in their own right whilst in turn making animals their victims. The subject of animal abuse throughout the wet markets is manifest and too serious a subject to be ignored. Moreover the man who tried so hard to warn the world was himself abused by the authorities. He was assaulted, imprisoned, publicly shamed and finally died via the virus he tried to warn the world about, but failed. A brief poem chronicles his lifeline: Goodbye Doctor Li.Even supposed macho heroes like Hemingway are shown as the cruel character he actually was, glorifying his violence as a badge of honour rather than what it is and should be seen to be: a badge of shame.While the abusive running spectacle in Pamplona, where bulls are abused all day and slaughtered for fun when they are exhausted, did not start with Hemingway, he was responsible for finding glamour and a thrill in the morbid deaths of the tortured bulls. The poem Jonah in Pamplona nails him to the sawdust floor where he belongs.In that same vein, Hemingway loved to boast about bullfighting. That is detailed while nailing the guilty culprits to the court door: the complacent English so-called 'animal lovers'. In that context the poems do not shrink from gunning for the merchants of slavery who were English. Their place in history is told in the story of The Zong. After all the English ran the slave gangs and trade for centuries throughout the world.A poem should touch the hand and head and heart. That is the aim and intention of each and the total and miscellany. Whether it hits the target is a matter for others in another time and place.While there are far too many forms of animal abuse we commit against them to isolate one type as the worst, those that are becoming extinct through our folly and greed would make the sky cry for the absence of birds. Yet the ocean is equally lonesome for the whales we hunt and kill. The poems track the roots of BLM so they may grow in our world and spread to theirs as a similar symbol of ALM. Meanwhile our politicians arrange a spree of culling badgers and killing bees, but with our blessing and in our name.We end where we began as we have sold most of the world down the river for a mess of pottage. A series of poems that echo the power of The Waste Land for the 21st century. We have destroyed a lot of our planet, yet are intent on destroying what remains. Are we heading towards an Animals' Armageddon where our world is a zoo while the last Blue-bird sings the Blues?"