See the Dog

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”)