Walking the Dog's Shadow

By Deborah Brown and Tony Hoagland

Walking the Dog's Shadow rose to the top of nearly eight hundred submissions to win the ninth annual A. Poulin, Jr. Poetry Prize. Tony Hoagland, who served as final judge for the contest, writes, "Deborah Brown's poems remind me a little of the great Polish poet, Wistawa Szymborska. They both make thinking look easy. . . . Brown's poems aren't just about a eureka moment; they taste of the whole journey. Walking the Dog's Shadow is a beautiful book, wise and sure of itself, fresh with wit and gravity, serious and true."

Deborah Brown teaches literature and writing at the University of New Hampshire-Manchester.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BOA Editions Ltd.
• Release date: Mar 29, 2011
• ISBN: 9781934414767

Deborah Brown

Deborah Brown’s first book, Walking the Dog’s Shadow (BOA Editions, 2009), won the A. J. Poulin Jr. Award from BOA Editions and a New Hampshire Literary Award. With Maxine Kumin and Annie Finch, she edited Lofty Dogmas: Poets on Poetics (Univ. of Arkansas Press, 2005). With Richard Jackson and Susan Thomas, she translated the poems in Last Voyage: Selected Poems of Giovanni Pascoli (Red Hen Press, 2010). She lives in Warner, NH.

Book preview

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Table of Contents

Title Page

Dedication

Foreword

I. - DON’T ASK

Proof

Small Sorrows

Don’t Ask

The Shoe That Dropped

Thick and Thin

Walking the Dog’s Shadow

Empty Red

Reprise

The Stalled Bus

Askew

Man Saves Dog’s Life

The Back of the Bike

On Alert

Narratively Speaking

II. - LISTEN

Clue

Listen

The Trap

On Not Knowing Your Father

The Scarlet Letter Law Struck Down in Massachusetts, Spring, 2003

Mamaloschen

In Spite of Time

After the Sky

Elegy for My Sister

The Graviton

String Theories

The Stone Wall

Unleashed

Last Things

III. - READ BETWEEN THE LINES

A Family Story

Read Between the Lines

Brokenhearted

Isadora’s Scarf

For the Cousins

The Night Is Balmy

The Figure in the Carpet

Behind the Door

Lake Massasecum, November, 2000

The Museum of Your Life

Magritte’s Dog

GPS System

Conjunctions Lead You Anywhere

The Subjunctive

Blackout

After and Before

The Chicken Soup

For Another Time

Acknowledgements

About the Author

BOA Editions, Ltd.

Colophon

Copyright Page

To George

Wild is not the same as free.

—Maxine Kumin

Foreword

Deborah Brown’s poems remind me a little of the great Polish poet Szymborska. Both poets make thinking look easy. Overwhelmed by the world, unqualified to fix anything, Brown’s speaker remains calmly capable of thought. I’m writing to you from inside, / in the thick of it, she says. And also, Bowling alone is no solution. And In college I was sure I had a soul ... What was I thinking? Did I mention the collaboration of wit and heart, which also characterizes Szymborska?

Witty, indeed, but such lines are rich with the sentiments of a grown-up person, one whose imagination has collided with experience and been repeatedly chastened. Compressed. The result is that Brown’s speaker is qualified to give testimony about the wide world that bruises our delicate human fruits, the brain and heart. One of the great pleasures of reading a grown-up poet is that beneath each line is audible the many lines that have been written and erased before it—a mature sensibility is one that has been built up through layers and layers of trial and error, made out of smudge and scalds and the healed wounds of earlier versions of feeling. What is it that they say? Tragedy plus time equals comedy? Then to time add resilience, and a game attitude, and a cultivated flair for speech, and you might get poetry:

When my friend said I had a Byzantine mind, I saw lofty minarets, intricate woven fabric. He thought tangled neurons, epistemic confusion, bits of plaque at war college devising an insurgency.

(Don’t Ask)

The broken symmetry is everywhere you look (Askew)—it sounds like a lament for disarray for the disintegrating postmodern world, and it is, but then again the brush with irregularity is part of every modern poet—Brown’s poems teeter and spin, seemingly out of control. It’s an intentional and unavoidable dizziness. In poetry, as in physics, centrifugal and centripetal are the forces that tug and pull