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 against each other, always on the verge of flying apart. “Take the tiny pieces and see if you / can make a life from them” (“The Back of the Bike”).

Brown is also a rhetorician, an argument-maker. In the poem “Reprise,” for instance, our poet resurrects the antique question, “Which is better, Love or Fame?”, and stays firmly on the side of fame, until the last turn. Is it a perverse enterprise to submit Love’s existence to the care of reason? Even so, Brown’s faultless logic finds its revelation:

Better than a lover’s heart, the immortality of a name.
Love versus Fama, the goddess, with her long purple nails,
her sweeping cloak, her memories of Caesar ...

 

Even better than love, fame, for as long as there is illness.
I see that if I had discovered Cushing’s disease,
I could have named it for myself....

 

They’re all forgotten, those heroes.
How much do we know of Cushing, or care?
... so back to love, the desire for love, the one
that costs everything, that shocks you
when someone else casts a shadow on the map
of the earth for the first time larger than your own.

I could quote from this collection all day, since Walking the Dog’s Shadow has plenty of wisdom, in its buoyant, adventurous modality. So let me just say, the poems here are exciting to read, teasing and pushy and serious and smart and full of heart. In Brown’s poems, our tour guide’s glasses (which are needed, because the eyes aren’t what they used to be) have somehow been misplaced. First she locates them, then finds a silver thread, which she follows down the winding corridors and stairways, to the deep part of the poem, where it touches life. Brown’s poems aren’t just about a eureka; 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, humane and true.

—Tony Hoagland