For almost forty years, Taylor Graham has trained her German Shepherds to find lost people. Her dogs have led her to, among other things, the footprints of a missing woman; two boys playing hooky; sudden screamer-vistas not meant for tourists, the spot in a river where a drowned man was wedged under rocks… Responding to hundreds of missions with her dogs, Taylor has searched backwoods and bypasses, wilderness canyons and National Parks, and cities devastated by earthquake. Her canine partner has shown her all sorts of things about “this morning and this new place” – things that can't be conveyed in words. If poetry is sensory, then her dog has a poet's nose.
These are poems about those dogs, from puppyhood to old age and beyond, present still in memory.