Monday'S Poem: 'Laelaps,' By Michael Collier

A look at Michael Collier's poem 'Laelaps,' and his affinity for writing about dogs.

A look at Michael Collier's poem 'Laelaps,' and his affinity for writing about dogs.By The Chronicle of Higher Education

Michael Collier’s sixth book of poems, An Individual History, will appear in 2012 with W.W. Norton. In 2009, he received an Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters.  He teaches in the creative writing program at the University of Maryland and is director of the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference.
 Arts & Academe‘s poetry editor, Lisa Russ Spaar, notes: Michael Collier writes a lot about dogs. In “A Real-Life Drama,” for example, a family pet who slaughters a pedigree rabbit reveals “the dark corner of his nature.” A chimerical pseudo Hillary Clinton figure “wraps his legs around Trotsky’s leg and humps like a dog” in “All Souls.” Collier’s elegant essay tribute to William Maxwell (from A William Maxwell Portrait:  Memories and Appreciations, edited by Collier along with Charles Baxter and Edward Hirsch) is entitled “The Dog Gets to Dover: William Maxwell as a Correspondent.” Nor is Collier alone in penning poems about Canis lupus familiaris; a quick Google search for “dog poems” yielded 4,590,000 results in 0.11 seconds, including work by W. S. Merwin, Mark Doty, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Stephen Dobyns, and Robert Burns.  Amazon.com lists 1,669 titles in the category of “dog poetry,” including the popularUnleashed: Poems by Writers’ Dogs, edited by Amy Hempel and Jim Shepard.
 Collier is also a poet whose passion for and insight into classical mythology often provide a discerning and provocative context for quotidian drama in his poems (Collier has done an acclaimed translation of Medea for Oxford University Press, as well). It makes sense, then, given these propensities, that he should turn his imagination to mythical canines (and there are no shortage of these either—not poems about mythical dogs, but dogs in myth—with Wikipedia offering 51 pages for “mythological dogs”).  The mezzo-soprano and composer Judith Cloud has, in fact, set three of Collier’s mythological dog poems to music: “Argos,”  “Cerberus,” and “Laelaps,” the latter published here for the first time.

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