Scott Edward Anderson's Poetry Blog

My dog Calvin died this year. He was fifteen and losing his ability to move. The last time I saw him, he was responsive, yet it was clear he was increasingly uncomfortable in his body. He always lit up when he saw me; sadly, I think he was always thinking, “At last you’ve come home.” I was not.

In fact, I lost Calvin in my divorce over 10 years ago and, after a few years of occasional visits in Brooklyn, I stopped getting to spend regular time with him. I know we both missed each other. (I’ve had a number of dogs in my life; we got Beverley in 2015 and, when she does something I wish she wouldn’t, I remind her that she’s neither my first dog nor my last.)

I wrote two poems about Calvin, both of which appear in the anthology, Dogs Singing. One, in the voice of Calvin, recounts his origin story, based upon what we were told by the PASPCA. The other is not so much about Calvin as about my growing restlessness in the home of my previous marriage. Calvin serves as a character, if not a symbol, along with mining bees and a redbud tree.

Because Calvin was put down earlier this year, Emily Berry’s poem, “Dream of a Dog,” which appeared originally in Granta last February and in her most recent collection, Unexhausted Time, struck a particular chord in me when I read it. Berry’s poem appears about a quarter of the way through the book and, after a series of untitled poems, it is the first poem with a title in the book and closes the book’s first, unnumbered section. (As readers, poets always look for things like this in a collection; there is usually a significance to such placements, signaling an intention on the part of the poet, as if to say, “pay attention to this one.”)

It’s also one of the few poems in the collection where, in the words of critic Steven Lovatt, writing in The Friday Poem, “the tone is for once gentle, undemonstrative and open to outside impressions.” Berry’s work has always struck me as characterized by a so-called “flat style,” which Noreen Masud, in an article in the journal Textual Practice, explains “involves postures of poetic melodrama which state themselves ‘flatly’, without apology.”

Berry’s “Dream of a Dog,” while it does use a flat style, also consists of one long sentence, or rather a fragment of a sentence, for it ends not with a full-stop period, but an ellipsis. The ellipsis hints there is more to come or, perhaps, that the reader could circle back to the beginning of the poem for it ends where it begins, with the words, “My life” as if the poem could be an endlessly cycling dream. 

It also causes me to question, is it the “dream of a dog,” as in, the speaker is dreaming of a dog (line 19 begins, “if I had a dog”) or is it a dream a dog is having, complete with its sighs. (My dog Beverley barks in her dreams, along with sighs, and chases things; I wish I knew what.)  

Emily Berry is the author of three poetry books published by Faber in the UK: Unexhausted Time (2022), Stranger, Baby (2017) and Dear Boy (2013). You can read more about her and her work at: https://www.emilyberry.co.uk/

Here is her poem, “Dream of a Dog”:

Dream of a Dog

My life, and all our lives, I said sleepily,
so soft now, like the neck of a sleeping dog,
I lay my hand on it, as you have lain your hand
on mine (on my life), this tenderly, as the dog
noses deeper into sleep, as she sighs the way
a dreaming dog does, I wish my life was in
your dream, dog, I think it is, and she turns
onto her back so her stomach rises pale and
softly furred, and your words are travelling
through me, or, no, they travel over me, the
way a breeze makes fabric touch us, the fabric
of half-drawn curtains billowing from an open
window, as I pass and glance out on such
a day, the dog whimpering softly in sleep;
perhaps it’s that you say I should have faith,
or that you have faith, in increments, while
my shoes are nosing through leaves and the
dog is alert or disappears (but she comes back),
if I had a dog she would be a kind of faith,
I would lift her onto my shoulder, the points
of her ears very elfin and her face, serious,
tilted to regard you, she would listen and run
and then, from a distance, up a slight incline,
when I call her, look back, then run on,
and I do believe in increments, as when
the dog brings me, in her dream, pinecones,
when she wriggles in my arms, her ribcage
strung like an archer’s bow, when her paws
bend at the wrist in supplication, I do not see
the slow wheels in my blood turning, but
I ride them, I do not see what I know
and everything beneath that, which I may
come to know, or may not, the slow slow
discernment of the deep layer, air bubbles
rising from the dead zone, the dog in her
dream talismanic on a hilltop, the soft tips
of her ears in sleep, a slight sigh, all my life.

–Emily Berry, from Unexhausted Time