GRL
warns of the danger in this situation, recalling “Oedipus is the first I know of, and that/ended as it began, with blindness.” In the next stanza, we move on to a much more banal but real contemporary warning: “But it’s also dangerous not to know/how a lawnmower works. My friend,/a sociology teacher, lost two fingertips/reaching into his . . . .” From Oedipus to machinery, in just a few lines. In this poem the leaps are unsettling, like riding on a roller coaster that seems to take the curves too fast. From the lost fingers Brown detours to Whitman’s Civil War nursing, to the narrator’s college days, to a tender moment somewhere nearer the present, with no further mention of the missing father in the title. In most poems, the ideas flow more carefully, and the general sense a reader gets from Walking the Dog’s Shadow is that Brown has a furiously busy mind, tamed somewhat by her command of craft. There is much to ponder here, but the poems are not didactic. Brown manages to teach us what she knows of the heart and mind, to wonder about the “big questions,” and to offer beauty even in the midst of unrest.
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