Cover Art: seals on a beach - Helgoland, Germany by Vera Kuttelvaserova, licensed from Adobe Stock
The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec
by Rodger Martin
The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec
The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec is a collection of poetry and short prose pieces built around the sometimes subtle at other times quite public influence dogs generate as they integrate themselves into our culture.
"Rodger’s sleeping dogs don’t lie. They know their canine ancestors, their legends in ancient caves, and we learn of ourselves in our relation to them. Rodger deftly moves across history, at each stop showing where we fit, an existence we neglect at peril. This volume, a kind of “collected” through his career, engages at every turn, with sensuous, heartfelt lines, perfectly executed (some prose, a few cats, and several silly pups!). Open wherever you wish and be rewarded."
— B. Eugene McCarthy
Praise for The Sleeping Dogs of Lubec
Rodger Martin’s poems romp, roll, and, sometimes, howl. They are heart-aching, heart-breaking, and—at heart—joyous. Seals glide in from the sea at night. Kin to the sleeping dogs of Lubec, they whisper in the ears of dreamers. The myths and bloody history of many cultures intertwine with bone-deep concern for our precious Earth. I will share these poems and (needs be) return to them again and again.
—Rebecca Rule, author of Live Free and Eat Pie!: A Storyteller's Guide to New Hampshire
Martin is building a mountain here, each poem a solid rock, each a world captured with amazing clarity, vision and artistry.
—John Hodgen, winner of the 2005 Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2005 Donald Hall Prize for Poetry
Here are animals of many kinds, roaming now as in their ancient past. Here too are ourselves, our capacity for respect and care, but also for disregard and conflict, wars over the centuries. All these Rodger draws for us, for we are mutual voyagers with these canine and fellow creatures (a few cats…and some mutts). Read, listen, and see anew.
—B. Eugene McCarthy is the author of Thomas Gray: The Progress of a Poet, co-author of Sound Ideas and co-editor of From Bondage to Belonging. He taught at Holy Cross for thirty-five years.
An Extended Review by Claire Mowbray Golding
Should we rouse the sleeping dogs of Rodger Martin’s 2025 poem collection, or should we let them lie? Martin doesn’t give us a moment to decide. Instead, he yanks the leash out of our hands and takes us on a romp through space and time, history and geography, myth and mirth and dreamscapes, and by the time we reach quantum physics we know we’ve been taught a whole universe of new tricks.
The dog theme takes five forms in this collection: we move from dire wolves—extinct now, but known for their very strong jaws—to Sirius, the brightest star in the night sky, to the havoc-wreaking dogs of war, the intensity of puppy love, and finally through the crazy highs and lows of mongrel life. Of 34 total poems, only three make no mention Canis familiaris or Canis lupus: two of those invoke Felis catus instead. Just one includes no direct reference to either species. I dog-eared my copy to verify these facts.
Blending past and present, imagining worlds that shimmer over our own, like old film negatives printed on top of each other, these poems call to us with a kaleidoscope of allusions—to The Odyssey, the underworld, Ancient Greece and Rome, medieval England, Paleolithic France, New England, the US Civil War, Martin’s own resonant past. But unlike the dog who can identify fifty thousand scents in a square foot of turf, yet can’t reveal a single hint of what he smells, Martin shares the worlds he’s taking in, and makes us feel them. A wolf howls in the night as a moose comes to grief on a lonely road; modern hikers transmogrify into Roman Centurions; boy and dog in the Scilly Isles shine as joyfully as Sirius itself.
Many of these poems are set in the evening or at night; most incorporate water in some form: rivers, marshes, beaches, tides, rain, flood, and tumultuous storms all have their roles to play, often making it a dog’s life for everyone involved. Yet humor emerges too, parting the clouds and offering us an eloquent collie poet, a man-dog duo that shakes up a college bureaucracy, and the irrepressible, unforgettable “Truck Drivin’ Dog,” who chomps steel radials with gleeful abandon.
It may be a dog-eat-dog world out there, the winters may be full of three-dog nights and the summers packed with those sultry, energy-sapping dog days, but my advice is this: take a trip with Rodger Martin to Lubec, Maine, the easternmost municipality of the USA, where (according to the town’s website) “every morning feels like a quiet promise,” and make friends with those sleeping dogs. It’ll be the start of a doggone good adventure.
— Claire Mowbray Golding
About the Reviewer: Claire Mowbray Golding has spent over 40 years in educational publishing as an editor and writer. Her prose work has been published in books, newspapers, magazines, textbooks, and reading programs. Her poetry has appeared in Worcester Magazine, The Worcester Review, New Millenium Writings, Contour (UK), Penning the Pandemic, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, and Three Decker. Awarded the Frank O’Hara Prize in 2003, she has also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. She lives in central Massachusetts.