Next Door to the Dead: Poems

By Kathleen Driskell

“A collection of poems that are bold, inviting, charming, different, humorous, and irreverent. Often, they slip the bonds of common expectation.” —Northern Kentucky Tribune

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.

“Driskell has written her path to the Kentuckian sublime.” —Shane McCrae, author of Sometimes I Never Suffered

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Aug 14, 2015
• ISBN: 9780813165738

Book preview

Part 1

In Praise

For the doe hit a week ago, knocked dead

to the cemetery culvert, I praise the buzzards

for coming out into the sleet and darkening day,

when the roadman would not. Praise

the greasy black prayer-circle, forgive

their unctuous attention. And the dark congregation,

a dozen or more who roost in the bare branches

of surrounding trees and praise to those at the outer

limbs who keep wait like feudal sentries

in worn-shine coats. All ready pallbearers

who will lift high the deer into the grave

weeping sky. But I’m also grateful for the one

in particular who has come to squat atop

the humble lichen-covered monument

of Sarah Blakemore, who had birthed six children, all

dead and lain before she. My highest praise is sent

to this dark angel of brief ornament.

Living Next to the Dead Acre

The preacher who sold us the old church

said Pshaw! Ain’t nobody been buried