Dog and Moon by Kelly Shepherd

Dog and Moon is a slow read, not because it is hard so much as it is rich and rewarding, so satisfies early and often. How did I not hear of this poet before? This is his third collection following the previous two from Thistledown: Insomnia Bird: Edmonton Poems (2018) and Shift (2016). I know it’s a lot of miles to cross but it is symptomatic of this country that doesn’t circulate poetry East to West as well as it could.

I’ve raved to a few friends about this as I read. It’s a comfort to find writing that cut above that is unequivocally poetry, not just poetry shaped. To get a sense of his point in the poetry spectrum, he quotes Gary Snyder, Susan Sontag, Harold Rhenisch, Denise Levertov, Robert Bly, Carl Sandburg, and architect Juhani Pallasmaa.

The book has 3 sections, enigmatically and playfully entitled as the poems: “The Raven-necklaced sky”, “The hidden mystery school is holding an open house” and “To become worthy of an ocean”. The poetry bridges profound and surreal, oblique and symbolic. Compared to what I gather from reviews of his past books, this leans less heavily on naturalist observation but also continues using such observations as a tool for his brain. That said, the energy routes through the visceral and corporal even when “Star-Naming”:

[...]Everything is overgrown, and overgreen.

The smell of hot air under spruce trees.
Gathering dry dead branches—scraped knuckles.

Scaly bark and the soft skin of wrists.
The fire with its breaking-twig voice.

Such bracingly physical poetry. Once I start a poem I want to go all the way through, but don’t want to overshare quotes so you can get the experience of discovering for yourself. Here’s a bit taken from the middle of p. 53. Note the link and shift as if a renga, the point of overlap then extending in a new direction:

A war with Mother Nature.
When a metaphor is taken too far it becomes a projectile.

Try to talk to someone when they’re snoring:
their responses are all the same. The mind races.

Happiness is only a purchase away,
but what happens when the box store runs out of boxes?

So that may be flippant, to be out of boxes, but is it not a consideration, that even goods are finite? It is not an infinite upward spiral of there being something to market, assuming all the cash and space unimpeded, we get sated. That’s a physical law. Even happiness or hollowness have hard limits before becoming something else. Thought that goes into poetry yields thought as a result of reading poetry, if done so well.

Dog and Moon has something of the energy of bastard ghazals but isn’t quite that either. In some poems it has a connection to the separate discrete objects set in parallel. Indeed it seems I’m not wrong — the promo material for the book says, “Kelly Shepherd’s form is inspired by ghazals, traditional Arabic love poems which date back to the 7^th century, and in Shepherd’s free verse twist on this ancient form couplets reprise themselves with a musicality that haunts the reader.”

There is the sense that a lot of inner work went on before the pen went to page, rather than the processing happening in the real time of writing the poems. The tone is not starched nor ironed nor sprayed to be wrinkle free.

There’s so much to love in images, turns, attitude and exploration. Nothing feels pat nor patronizing, contrived nor expected.

There’s so much to love in images, turns, attitude and exploration. Nothing feels pat nor patronizing, contrived nor expected. It feels calm, alert and energetic not capering frenetic. It is tightly paced to go at a good clip without toppling to summative nor abstract. He references reading without getting all up in his head. He stays with one foot grounded in visceral experience, even if that experience is imagined based on learning. In the poem “Every Saskatoon Leaf Holds a Glowing Bead of Rain”, the title isn’t a placeholder but works for the setup of content and tone, is not myopic to see only green but to see and name details — and the poem continues in kind: “let me wake up as an earthworm: my entire body/twisting with taste buds, each new vein of soil a feast.”

In poetry, there’s attending to and valuing something other than human enough to trot out wiki stats of species collapse or explicitly mourn as modern public figure duty, and then there is this more attentive valuing — of knowing how earthworms sense, or the intimacy of the casual mention of how “bees hold each other’s legs as they sleep” (p. 68, “Applications will be considered on a rolling basis until the position is filled”).

I feel a kind of wonder in how his poems hang mid-air: try and scrutinize, run your metal ring around the bodies of couplets, of whole poems but the magic of it working can’t be explained nor denied.

The magic of it working can’t be explained nor denied.

There’s the work of a flower petal mandala here, bringing in dispersed, diverse aspects of the universe into a coherent picture that is not only at times breathtaking but life affirming, and not above a bad pun or snark. The gestures are controlled but free to swing for good effect. There is a tickling openness in the created form. I’ll leave the last words to Shepherd, p 26:

All these books keep saying life is terrible,
the world is a terrible place. Why don’t I believe them?

Field poetics. Should a poem be mowed in straight lines?
Or should the line be a wild prairie?

Kelly Shepherd is a poetry editor for the Trumpeter. His second poetry collection, Insomnia Bird, won the 2019 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize. Originally from Smithers, British Columbia, he lives and teaches on Treaty 6 territory in Edmonton.

Publisher: University of Regina Press (March 11, 2025)
Paperback 8″ x 6″ | 112 pages
ISBN: 9781779400383

Pearl Pirie

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Pearl Pirie's latest is we astronauts (Pinhole Press, 2025). Pirie’s 4th poetry collection is footlights (Radiant Press, 2020). rain’s small gestures(Apt 9 Press, 2021) won the 2022 Nelson Ball Prize. www.pearlpirie.com and patreon.com/pearlpiriepoet

Pearl Pirie

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