Next Door to the Dead

Poems

Kathleen Driskell

• Publisher: The University Press of Kentucky
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9780813165721
• eBook ISBN:
  9780813165745
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Poetry
• Index: Literature

When Kathleen Driskell tells her husband that she's gone to visit the neighbors, she means something different than most. The noted poet—whose last book, Seed across Snow, was twice listed as a national bestseller by the Poetry Foundation—lives in an old country church just outside Louisville, Kentucky. Next door is an old graveyard that she was told had fallen out of use. In this marvelous new collection, this turns out not to be the case as the poet's fascination with the "neighbors" brings the burial ground back to life.

Driskell frequently strolls the cemetery grounds, imagining the lives and loves of those buried beside her property. These "neighbors," with burial dates as early as 1848, inspire poems that weave stories, real and imagined, from the epitaphs and unmarked graves. Shifting between perspectives, she embraces and inhabits the voices of those laid to rest while also describing the grounds, the man who mows around the markers, and even the flocks of black birds that hover above before settling amongst the gravestones.

Next Door to the Dead transcends time and place, linking the often disconnected worlds of the living and the deceased. Just as examining the tombstones forces the author to look more closely at her own life, Driskell's poems and their muses compel us to examine our own mortality, as well as how we impact the finite lives of those around us.

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Ars Poetica
• Part 1
• In Praise
• Living Next to the Dead Acre
• Funeral, in February
• The Mower
• Child's Poem for Sgt. Horace Mitchell Jr., 1946-1968
• Consolation
• Art Poetica
• Mounds
• What Haunts
• Epitaph
• Infant Daughter, Marcus, 2 years old, Myra 8 Days
• Markers
• Part 2
• Epitaph
• Next Door to the Dead
• Pathetic Fallacy
• Lament for the Crow
• Just Off Shore, the Shadows Move
• The Egyptologist Speaks from the Grave
• Inishmor, Aran Islands
• Tchaenhotep
• Love Poetry
• Epitaph
• Night
• Death of the Civil War Infantryman, Mill Springs, Kentucky
• Part 3
• The Death of the Snake Handler
• Epitaph
• Cemetery Irony
• At Harland Sanders's Grave
• Too Late
• Border State
• Epitaph
• At the Grave of the Girl Slave
• Epitaph
• Infant Girl Smithfield
• Just As
• From the Grave of the Mathematician
• Mt. Zion, 1918
• Part 4
• On a Walk
• Clearcut
• Shunned
• One Side of the Double Marker Left Unengraved
• Epitaph
• Epitaph
• Not Done Yet
• Epitaph
• Unused Grave
• When the Dog Went Blind
• Empty Grave
• Up and Against the Sky
• Flock
• Acknowledgments
• Index of First Lines
• Series page