Dog and Moon

A dreamlike collection of poetry that intertwines an embodied experience of the natural world with mythology, memory, and the creative process

Woven together from fragments collected in notebooks and dream journals over two decades of introspection, Dog and Moon inhabits a space of sleeplessness, enveloped in the darkness of night. Kelly Shepherd draws inspiration from the free-verse ghazal but takes the form and bends it to create a sort of Indra’s Net, with couplets echoing and reflecting across his poems. They are a series of juxtapositions: nature writing placed in conversation with the language of poetry workshops, mythology and childhood memories, and sensorial encounters with the natural world colliding with images of home and belonging.
My ribs, the mattress’s ribs--I can’t sleep. This is a war,
says the newscaster reporting on the winter storm.

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?

Time moves differently depending on your bedsprings.
From a net of clouds, the moon:

so much of writing is trying to remember
your thoughts from other states of consciousness.

An inexplicable need to follow
the pathways of unseeable sparks and insects in the blankets.

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.