Dog and Moon

Dog and Moon
by Kelly Shepherd
Published by University of Regina Press
Review by Shelley A. Leedahl
$19.95 ISBN 9781779400383

Quirky contradictions, interconnectedness, and more swerves than the North Saskatchewan—Kelly Shepherd’s Dog and Moon delivers an audacious selection of poems that’ll make you think and possibly cheer, thanks to wordplay concerning the natural world, domesticity, etymology, poetry workshops (“Describe snow to someone who has never experienced it before”) and metaphors against a backdrop of shadows, mirrors, moons, frogs, feathers, Canadian writers and “concrete-coloured snow.” In this third poetry collection, Shepherd’s used the ancient ghazal form for inspiration, but he gives his couplets a contemporary twist with reverberations, koan-like riddles, a dash of politics and lines that had me smiling. Even titles are a hoot: “The Poetics of Space Heaters,” and “If Your Eyes Weren’t Prisms, Would You Notice?” Prediction: this book will earn awards.

Firstly, the pairings and unusual juxtapositions. The book begins: “A man walks out of a forest. What walks out of him?” In the second poem: “Fish grow leafy fins and tails. Trees grow fish-shaped leaves./The trees, water, fire of childhood.” The poet takes two things, ie: fish and trees, then throws in a random third element, ie: “fire of childhood.”

Ghazals often include questions, and Shepherd’s adopted this characteristic in several pieces, asking, for example, “Did we pray to the gods who would eat us/by eating them?” and the anti-capitalist “Happiness is only a purchase away,/but what happens when the box store runs out of boxes?” His questions range from the simple “Do you believe in dogs?” to writerly concerns, ie: “Who ever anywhere will read these written words?”

In reviewing Shepherd’s first book, Shift, I noted several unique word combinations re: colour descriptions, and here he impresses again, ie: “sunrise-coloured seagulls,” “Daylight the colour of beets,” and “the silence goes violet.”

Childhood reminiscences can spread a warmth across poems. In “What’s it going to Be? Marie Kondo, or Tsundoku?”, we find this beauty:

Can you feel it? It’s the distant glitter of sunlight

on lakewater between trees, first glimpsed from the back seat,

in one of your earliest memories of summer.

In following lines, he leaps into a Walt Whitman quote, and a “bookstore customer, rough-bearded/and rough-handed,” and “So much fog on the lake.” Indeed, there’s much peculiarity throughout the collection, ie: the line “I prefer the onomatopoeic style of interior design.”

“Limn” celebrates personification: “Hands of sand hold on to the afternoon’s heat,” “The pale brown gravel road’s long legs/follow the shore,” and “The lake last night was so close/I could hear it breathe, its fingers on the glass.”

And then there’s the humour, ie:

A journey of a thousand miles

begins with a single schlep.

and “How to distinguish British Columbians from Albertans?/Look at their choice of Self-Help books.”

I can appreciate all the verbal backflips and hopscotching. The surprises. Like the Edmonton/Treaty 6 Territory poet, I believe that “A poem is a torch with a beam of shadow/instead of light.” I see the hills’ “nettle-coloured eyes,” and hear “The fire with its breaking-twig voice.” And I feel richer for it all.

THIS BOOK IS AVAILABLE AT YOUR LOCAL BOOKSTORE OR FROM WWW.SKBOOKS.COM