Dogs Singing - A Tribute Anthology

By: Jessie Lendennie

€16.99

Buy a copy today, signed by the editor. Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology brings together poems which highlight and examine and celebrate the canine world, and our place in it. "First love, enduring love; the witness, the stoic, the companion, th...

ISBN	978-1-907056-50-5
Pub Date	Thursday, November 18, 2010
Cover Image	'Blue' by Margaret Nolan
Page Count	462
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Buy a copy today, signed by the editor. Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology brings together poems which highlight and examine and celebrate the canine world, and our place in it.

"First love, enduring love; the witness, the stoic, the companion, the protector, the better part of us, the abiding presence, the warrior, the survivor, the guardian angel. Here is a big book of many poems, all inspired, devoted, motivated by a sacred bond that happens, the supreme privilege, that something far bigger than romance - a relationship with a dog. Dogs do sing; they also smile, socialise, engage and celebrate, mark a homecoming in proper style, even if it’s only the return from the local grocery store; they sigh, but most of all they understand, they grieve, they mourn, they empathise, they remember..."

Eileen Battersby, Arts Writer & Literary Correspondent, The Irish Times

Contributors are: Scott Edward Anderson, Renée Ashley, Neil Astley, Celeste Augé, Michael Augustin, Paul Barclay, Judith Barrington, Marck L. Beggs, Richard Berengarten, Drew Blanchard, Jane Blanchard, Pat Boran, Eva Bourke, Brian Brett, Megan Buckley, Simmons B. Buntin, Sandra Bunting, Louise C. Callaghan, Hélène Cardona, Seamus Cashman, Ann Fox Chandonnet, Patrick Chapman, Kelly Cherry, Sarah Clancy, Jennifer Clark, Thomas Cochran, Andrea Cohen, Susan Cohen, Nahshon Cook, Patrick Cotter, Dallas Crow, Eleanor Cummins, Jack Brae Curtingstall, Gill Dalley, J.P. Dancing Bear, Larry O. Dean, Susie DeFord, Annie Deppe, Theodore Deppe, Stephen Dobyns, Theo Dorgan, Amy Dryansky, Susan Millar DuMars, Cynthia Schwartzberg Edlow, Peter Fallon, Elaine Feeney, John Fitzgerald, Gabriel Fitzmaurice, Janice Fitzpatrick Simmons, Lisa Frank, Philip Fried, Paul Genega, Peter Joseph Gloviczki, Desmond Gough, Julian Gough, Richard W. Halperin, Gerard Hanberry, Noel Hanlon, Maurice Harmon, Anne Le Marquand Hartigan, Michael Hartnett, Michael Heffernan, Patrick Hicks, Kevin Higgins, Rita Ann Higgins, John Hildebidle, Amy Holman, Ron Houchin, Adam Houle, Ben Howard, Holly J. Hughes, Bette Lynch Husted, Alexander Hutchison, Sabine Huynh, Brad Johnson, Fred Johnston, Thomas Kabdebo, Conor Mark Kavanagh, Jean Kavanagh, Deirdre Kearney, Anne Kennedy, Noel King, Philip Kingston, Jacqueline Kolosov, Ted Kooser, Danuta E. Kosk-Kosicka, Anatoly Kudryadivsky, Maxine Kumin, Yahia Lababidi, Jessie Lendennie, Dave Lordan, Caroline Lynch, Thomas Lynch, John MacKenna, Mary Madec, Sebastian Matthews, Tom Mathews, William Matthews, Afric McGlinchey, Cecilia McGovern, Iggy McGovern, Irene McKinney, Kevin McLellan, Devon McNamara, Máighréad Medbh, Paula Meehan, John Menaghan, Alexa Mergen, Karla Linn Merrifield, Agi Mishol, Patricia Monaghan, Noel Monahan, John Montague, Alan Jude Moore, Susan Moorhead, Mary Mullen, Pete Mullineaux, Richard Murphy, Les Murray, Kate Newmann, Joan Newmann, Sheila Nickerson, Tommy Frank O’Connor, Mary O’Donnell, Gréagóir Ó Dúill, James Desmond O’Hara, Michael O’Loughlin, Nessa O’Mahony, Mary O’Malley, Padraig O’Morain, Micheal O’Siadhail, Alicia Ostriker, Katie O’Sullivan, Chris Oke, Harry Owen, Richard Peabody, Gary Percesepe, John Perrault, George Petty, Susan Pilewski, Alexis Quinlan, Jacob Rakovan, Barbara Regenspan, C. R. Resetarits, Billy Reynolds, Moira Rhoarke, Patricia Robertson, Bertha Rogers, James Silas Rogers, William Pitt Root, Gabriel Rosenstock, Gibbons Ruark, Lex Runciman, Layne Russell, Breda Wall Ryan, C.J. Sage, Aimée Sands, John W. Sexton, Anne Shaw, Glenn Shea, Eileen Sheehan, Joan I. Siegel, Scot Siegel, Kevin Simmonds, Ben Simmons, James Simmons, Siobhán of Carna, Knute Skinner, J.D. Smith, Laura Lundgren Smith, Mark Smith-Soto, Steven Ray Smith, Gerard Smyth, Joel R. Solonche, Scott T. Starbuck, Julian Stannard, Laura-Gray Street, Matthew Sweeney, Jordan Taylor, Adam Tavel, Ilsa Thielan, Nancy J. Thompson, Wendy Thornton, Diana Thurbon, Pam Uschuk, Peter van de Kamp, Michelle Valois, Michèle Vassal, Jeanne Wagner, Drucilla Wall, Eamonn Wall, Emily Wall, William Wall, Gordon Walmsley, John Walsh, David Wheatley, Laurelyn Whitt, C.K. Williams, Christopher Woods, Joseph Woods, Adam Wyeth, Sharon Young

Royalties from this book are being donated to the Soi Dog Foundation (Phuket, Thailand) and Madra (Connemara, County Galway)

Jessie Lendennie

Jessie Lendennie was born in Arkansas, USA. After years of travel, she settled in Ireland in 1981. Her previous publications include a book-length prose poem Daughter (1988); reprinted as Daughter and Other Poems in 2001. She complied and edited: Salmon: A Journey in Poetry, 1981-2007; Poetry: Reading it, Writing It, Publishing It (2009) and Dogs Singing: A Tribute Anthology (2010). She is co-founder (1981) and Managing Director of Salmon Poetry. Her poems, essays and articles have been widely published and she has given numerous readings, lectures and writing courses in Ireland and abroad, including Yale University; Rutgers University; The Irish Embassy, Washington D.C; The University of Alaska, Fairbanks and Anchorage; MIT, Boston; The Loft, Minneapolis, MN; Café Teatre, Copenhagen, Denmark; the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville; The Irish American Cultural Centre, Chicago and The Bowery Poetry Club, New York City. She is currently working on a memoir To Dance Beneath the Diamond Sky.

Seven Dogs
by Andrea Cohen

The life of a man
is measured by seven dogs.

The first dog says: and now
we shall eat and lap

water and walk in the woods.
We will sleep often in sunny spots.

There will be much
chasing of squirrels, but we

will not speak of death.
Then the man speaks

of death to himself, but
not to the second dog, who

must learn to heel
and come, and this goes

on. Seven dogs. And then one
evening the seven dogs

come to him with seven
sets of slippers. It is a trick

they never mastered in life.
Is it time? he asks. And

he follows his pack, good
dog that he is, into the woods.

This poem will also appear in Andrea Cohen’s forthcoming collection, Kentucky Derby (Salmon Poetry, 2011).
Copyright © Andrea Cohen 2010

Who’d be a dog?
by Paula Meehan

Who’d be a dog, who’d be a poet’s dog?
When we could be up the beach digging holes
sniffing holes, cooling the paws in the sea,

she’s stuck to her iBook, worrying a line
‘stars so clear have been dead for years...
stars so dead have been clear for years...’
She thinks she’s it with her buttons, her plug.

It’s bye-bye puppy, hello Microsoft Word;
it’s laptop now where once it was lapdog.

We look so cosy, me curled at her toes,
the two of us here in the house on our own.
If she dropped down dead this instant who’d know?
Who’s a good doggy then, eh? Who’s the best girl?

Give or take a day or two, it’d be a week max,
before, craven with hunger, I’d start in to eat:

top o’ the foodchain to you, my last mistress!
as I lick at her bare, her cooléd feet.

Copyright © Paula Meehan 2010

Xochi’s Tale
by Maxine Kumin

Is it my fault I’m part rat terrier, part
the kind of dog who lives in a lady’s lap?
I didn’t ask to be bottom mutt in the pack
that runs untamed through the twisted trash-strewn streets
in Xochiapulcho, I didn’t ask to be plucked
up by a pair of gringos. First, they took
away my manhood. No more sweet reek
of bitches, no hot pursuits, no garbage rot.
When they packed up to go back to the USA
I thought they’d cry, then dump me out, but no.        .
Macho mestizo, my entry papers say.
Who dines in style and sleeps the sleep of kings
ought dream no more of his rowdy half-starved days. . .
I dwell in heaven but without the wings.

Copyright © Maxine Kumin 2010