See the Dog
Matt Kingcroft
4.5”x7.5” | 28pp
ISBN 978-1-7388173-2-0
The poems in Matt Kingcroft’s See the Dog emerge from the fuzzy days of early parenthood wide-eyed with wonder, big-hearted with love, and clear-sighted with a sharp, observant gaze. Kingcroft is unsentimental about the difficulties of caring for an infant: eyes that “slowly come unglued” at the early-morning cries of a child; the anxieties of fever; the “exhausting, happy-fool / Groundhog Day of parenthood” – yet these moments are set against the huge joys of many small discoveries. These are poems filled with light of every kind: daylight seeping through “the thin flesh of your ear; how / it glows like a heat lamp”, a “slatted sun digging wells in the hardwood” of a floor, the moon’s “night a silver sliver / on the day’s naked blue”. We are brought along on a child’s discovery of the world in all its wonders, and are given the gift of all true poetry, which is learning to see that world anew:
…I follow your gaze and I see you are just
watching the sunrise. Nothing else
but the second-by-second passing
of a star as it climbs our small world.
(from “All Our Mornings”)
Matt Kingcroft is a writer and librarian, whose work has appeared or is forthcoming in Image Journal, The Maine Review, The Trumpeter, and elsewhere. He lived in Vancouver, BC for the last decade, but recently moved back to his hometown of Edmonton, AB, where he now lives with his wife and two children.