From the best-selling photographer of Ancient Trees: Portraits of Time, here are grand, platinum-palladium portraits of Gallus gallus.

Funny, fierce, and flamboyant, heritage-breed chickens assess the camera in black and white. Like marble busts, Beth Moon's focus on the birds' faces reveals character traits about the birds and - if we look long enough - about ourselves.

Moon's approach is underscored with pairings from classic literature, which - rather than simply anthropomorphising the birds - acknowledges their souls. The proud Silver Appenzellar Spitzhauben is flanked by a description of a poet, from George Eliot's Middlemarch. A plump Black Sumatra illuminates a particularly Dostoyevskian paragraph from The Brothers Karamazov. And a relatively plain, wrinkle-eyed Reza Asla mirrors a description of a preacher from James Baldwin's Go Tell It on the Mountain.

From the camera of one of the greatest living chroniclers of nature, beautifully designed and printed, here is an art book for lovers of photography, great literature, and of course, chickens.

With a foreword by actress, filmmaker, and philanthropist Isabella Rossellini.