With its punning title, Doggerel, the newest of Everyman's Library "pocket" poetry anthologies reminds us how closely aligned are poets - indeed, all humankind - to the canine experience.
By DAVID WALTON
Published December 9, 2003
DOGGEREL: Poems About Dogs
Selected and edited by Carmela Ciuraru
With its punning title, Doggerel, the newest of Everyman's Library "pocket" poetry anthologies reminds us how closely aligned are poets - indeed, all humankind - to the canine experience.
Like all single-theme anthologies, this collection of Poems About Dogs is a mixed bag: snatches of Chaucer, Spenser (Shepheard's Dogge from The Shepheardes Calendar), Shakespeare; poems ranging from praise of dogs' loyalty and companionship, to elegies to particular dogs; from puppy love, through the virtues of particular breeds, to poems about dog walking, poems about sleeping dogs, barking dogs, hunting dogs, and best of all, "Doggerel, Or, In Their Own Words," where dogs get to rhyme for themselves.
Doggerel is great fun, even if you don't own a dog - especially if you don't own a dog. It opens, after the obligatory Ogden Nash An Introduction to Dogs, with Rudyard Kipling's The Power of the Dog, which I pulled from my reviewer's galleys to give to a neighbor whose aged dog was dying from a tumor. The collection runs heavily to the sentimental and the humorous, with a number of strange and sweet surprises. There's The Song of the Mischievous Dog by Dylan Thomas, "Written at the age of 11."
There's Mathew Arnold, the Dover Beach poet, with two separate poems eulogizing dead dogs, and Stevie Smith, the dour "not waving but drowning" poet, with five poems, more than anyone in the book. There's Lawrence Ferlinghetti with a dog's-eye tour of San Francisco, and Mark Strand's hilarious Eating Poetry, a villanelle to Dog Kibble by Charles Baxter, and James Tate's bittersweet The Promotion, in which a shepherd's happy dog who guards the sheep and keeps the wolves and coyotes away is reborn as a human being: "At my job I work in a cubicle and barely speak/to anyone all day. This is my reward for being/a good dog. The human wolves don't even see me./They fear me not."
This anthology highlights the essential difference between traditional and modern poetry. The dog in traditional poetry is somebody's dog. In William Cowper's The Task: "Forth goes the woodman, leaving unconcern'd/The cheerful haunts of man - His dog attends him."
Dogs in traditional poetry do doggy things: "with many a frisk/Wide-scamp'ring, snatches up the drifted snow/With iv'ry teeth, or ploughs it with his snout - "
In modern poetry, where every dog gets his due, we go into the dog mind, in Louis Untermeyer's Dog at Night and W.S. Merwin's Dog Dreaming.
In Lisel Mueller's Small Poem about the Hounds and the Hares, after the feast, "the hounds, drunk on the blood of the hares,/begin to talk of how soft/were their pelts, how graceful their leaps,/how lovely their scared, gentle eyes."
As for what dogs would say if they could talk, the answer comes in Karen Shepherd's four-line masterpiece, Birch:
"You gonna eat that?
"You gonna eat that?
"You gonna eat that?
"I'll eat that."
- David Walton is a writer who lives in Pittsburgh.
"Doggerel: Poems About Dogs," selected and edited by Carmela Ciuraru, Everyman's Library, $12.50, 256 pages
