Review of The Dogs, by Michael Stewart, pub. Smokestack 2023

[sheenaghpugh]

book cover

This is one of those themed collections where it is important to distinguish between theme and subject matter. Superficially, it concerns the dog, past, present and future: the first part is an imagining of prehistoric doggery- their creation myths (“In the Beginning”), their intrinsic nature (“Digging”), their relationship with early man, fateful for the integrity and independence of their species. The second part examines the present state of this one-sided relationship in more depth, while the third is set in a future where dogs transcend this relationship and become more like people. (Though it isn’t quite so straightforward, for there are three poems titled “In This Boke That Cald Genesis” scattered throughout the collection which continue the mythmaking.)

In all three parts though, humans are as much the subject as dogs. What they do to dogs by way of exploitation, alteration and appropriation is emblematic of what they do to the world in general. At the end of “The Man”, we see the dog’s dilemma, but we also see how easily, in these lines, “dog” could be replaced by “man” and “man” by “god”:

     Dog looked around at his lot,
     were he to leave the man
     he had nowhere to go, no source of food
     and no shelter.
     There was no way back
     to the place
     he’d come from.
     He had no choice:
     now he loved
     T H E   M A N

And in “The War Dog School”, even without the echo of Emma Lazarus the parallels would be clear:

      Shoeburyness, Essex, 1917:
      Airedale, Lurcher, Mastiff.
     We take your strays.
     We will clear out Battersea.
     Give us your terriers,
      collies and Great Danes.
     We will turn your poodles into pinschers,
     your retrievers into sentries,
     your pugs into pugilists,
     your Shih Tzu into soldiers.
     We want sagacity, fidelity
     and a strong sense of duty.
     We will place you on
     the Western Front,
     take our messages through
     clouds of mustard gas
     while men in trenches
     peer through masks.

     Missing from the cenotaph:
     the dog who ran across
     No-Man’s Land
     and collaborated with the Boche.

The man/dog parallels are well handled, as are those poems dealing with the dog’s essential nature – “Digging” is particularly convincing:

     Past amber and pewter, Thor’s hammer,
     through new red sandstone, coal,
     silurian slates and millstone grit,
     until the rock beneath claw
     turned hot and molten.
     As the earth he dug got hotter,
     he smelled the brimstone
     and felt the fires.

This is also one of the mythologising poems that worked for me. I’m not so sure about some others, partly because I doubt any species except ours is self-obsessed enough to make myths about itself, partly also because the “Genesis” poems are in a sort of cod Anglo-Saxon, a device I’ve seen in other poems and novels in recent years. I understand why: to convey antiquity, but there’s antiquity and antiquity, and Stone Age man (or dog) talking Old English doesn’t quite feel right to me, though I don’t profess to know how he could have done it instead – unless indeed he used the phonetic spelling technique he later employs in “Dog’s Final Testament”.

Some of the poems in the second part about how humans have altered dogs for their own purposes are excellent, particularly “Corinthians 13:12”, with an ending it would be wrong of me to spoil by quoting. And the fantasy of “The Rapture” uses humour to good effect:

     The land is shining
     now that it has gone to the dogs.

“The Dogs are Laughing” does a similar thing with its line My dog, why hast thou forsaken me?, playing on the famous dog/god coinage and turning its meaning, because here it is the worshipper, not the god, who has absconded.

I don’t think it always avoids the trap of anthropomorphism, eg the note of indignation in “Chihuahua”:

     You will not listen to baby talk.
     You have been called ‘teacup’ for too long,
     do not answer them, when they shout:
     Fifi, Foo-Foo, Pookie, Pumpkin or Tinkerbell.

This is surely a human point of view; the dog couldn’t care less what you call it. However, as the quotations above should make clear, this is an unusual, original and challenging collection.