The Bark of the Dog (review)

Merrill Gilfillan writes in his essay collection, Magpie Rising: Sketches from the Great Plains, "I remember reading as a child, curled on a sofa, stories of the plains tribes by the hour. There was the narrative excitement, of course, but what lingered, I see now, what took root and ripened, were the place names, the rivers, ridges, and ranges, the geographic word softly detonating and filling the head till my inner ear roared as of conch shell." It should come as no surprise, then, that in his most recent poetry collection, The Bark of the Dog, Gilfillan largely abandons any "narrative excitement" in favor of the place names that have resonated with him since childhood.

In this collection, Gilfillan enacts what he describes in the quote from Magpie Rising; alongside everyday language, the poems in The Bark of the Dog are ripe with the precise language of place, culminating in that conch shell's roar in the reader's ear. Creeks, tribes, and historical events all find homes within these sonically textured poems, often incorporating irregular rhyme to carry them to completion.

The collection is arranged in three sections, the first comprising short one- to two-page lyrics that establish the acoustic playground on which the rest of the collection builds. In "Covey Call," Gilfillan grapples with historical place and the language used to preserve it. "Wapontake, a word from Magna Carta," the speaker begins, then "Comanches dreamed a dream town / by the river—covey call—complete / with plaza and los alamos for shade, / Spanish curtains lifting in the breeze." However, as the poem tells us, the town was abandoned, and "Now no one can find the place. / Place the find can one no now." Here the slippage of historical knowledge is akin to the slippage of language, and both are problems that Gilfillan's poetics attempt to amend. "Three Songs (For Federico)" also explores specific places and works to preserve them. In full, the poem reads:

1. Willow Creek

Its willows arecoyote willows by the book,and when the coyote slips

into their shadeand disappears they wavecoyote's willows—

    Day's    lock    picked.

2. Antelope Creek

Antelope Creek will neversleep. Boys and girlscut down. Meadowlarks sing,pronghorns run the hills—six join twelve, five morefrom the east make twenty-three—But Antelope Creek can never sleep.

3. Blacktail Creek

Blacktail Creeksearching for its trees . . .

Old woman keeps themin her bonnet with the bees—

sets them freewhen October hits the leaves.

While they are acts of preservation, these poems also enact action—why will Antelope Creek never sleep? (Gilfillan tells us in the notes.) Why is Black-tail Creek searching for its trees? These specifics, unfamiliar to most of us, demand further investigation—a potentially enlightening deed for the reader, as this search will lead to a greater awareness of the historical contexts that haunt this land. The section closes with a short poem, "August Evening," exploring the relation between language and the natural world, quoted in full:

When the bats        show upthe words drop        down to hide.

The second section, "Tulip Trees," contains longer poems—mostly letters—of three to four pages that speak to at least two incarnations of "you." The first poem, "Letter to Farouk," introduces a "You" who is "in Croatia, / [. . .] reasons / unclear." Despite the European locale, the speaker still relays information of home: "Catalpas / are in blossom (from the Creek, / not the Greek: 'head with wings')." And then, surely revealing the speaker's present condition, "Audubon, also / in mid-reverie, from one / of his Delineations: / 'Reader, I am very happy,' " before closing the letter wondering, "And when do you get back?" In "Summer Letter," the speaker writes to someone else familiar with writer and subject: "Meanwhile, Farouk / is in Croatia." Still, the speaker relays Plains geography, stating, "When the heat breaks / I'm going up to see the North Platte" and "The bluffs mint green last week / now a dromedary brown." But earlier in the poem, the speaker shares a reference that seemingly...