Moon Dogs
by Edmund August

  
        

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 Moon Dogs -- Poems by Edmund August (2005), 83 pages, $14.00
ISBN 1893239403


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Nicholasville, KY 40356

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"Tough, yet tender, these poems by Edmund August ask us to reimagine the world in startling new ways. Sometimes, they are as haunting as the hounds in his title, baying at the moon. Other times, they are cool as a young Ray Charles smoking a cigarette on a balcony overlooking the Champs d'Elysee. I dare you to read these poems and be unmoved."
--- Fred Smock
   
"Ed August brings to his Eastern Kentucky raisings what Chris Offutt brings to his in prose, writing that is passionate, raw, and unsparing. These poems have a pull to them that is as sure and irresistible as the moon. Like the proverbial blacksmith's horseshoe, they heat from the inside out."
--- Richard Taylor, author of Earth Bones and Girty
   
"Edmund August's Kentucky moon lights the way for the reader throughout this book. It often blushes tenderly on a wooden porch or works to soften the grief at a new grave. Most frequently, though, it rages fiercely through
prison windows and the stingy mountain farmlands of the South. These are muscular poems of place if ever I've read any, but these words aren't nostalgic syrup: they are melancholy, violent, and bone-rattling true."
--- Kathleen Driskell, author of Laughing Sickness
  


  Poems from Moon Dogs:

Of Light

Fishing beneath the tendrilled
shade of a weeping willow,
I watched a barefoot Quaker girl 
stop at Elkhorn Creek to bathe.

She sat cross-legged on a rock 
that sloped into the water,
and as she unravelled her braids
I saw the sole of one foot,

black earth framing the arch, 
a half moon glowing white 
as the Light that sustained her.
I wanted nothing more, than to 

bathe in her Light, be that rock 
upon which she rested, to feel 
the press of her feet, the grace
of her quiet communion. 


Helen

My neighbor's wife 
leaves us every morning. 

She stands beside the lawn mower 
beneath a bur oak in their backyard 

and stares, lips parted, at children 
screaming, running 

through the drainage ditch, into the park 
her nightgown so faded 

not even the mid-morning sun 
can draw pink from its memory, 

so thin her nipples make sense 
of my stupid stare.