Poetry and Pet Lovers Will Love This Book

A couple weeks ago, I was taking a break in the back room of the bookstore where I work and I noticed a small book sitting atop a pile of books behind me. Always a sucker for a good dog story, I saw the title Love That Dog and thought I’d take a look. I read the back and then proceeded to open the book to the first page. By the end of the break I was several pages in and determined to finish the roughly 90-page book off during my half-hour lunch break. My lunch was good, but the reading was even more nourishing.

Although Sharon Creech’s Love That Dog is subtitled “a novel,” the print is unusually large and the writing on each page is quite sparse. It is, in fact, a type of epistolary novel, filled with entries in the classroom poetry journal of a boy named Jack. After he writes his reactions to the day’s lesson, first reluctantly but with growing enthusiasm, his teacher arranges his prose so that it looks like poetry.

The book reminded me a bit of Beverly Cleary’s Dear Mr. Henshaw. Like Mr. Henshaw, Jack’s teacher gives advice and instruction to which we only see the response. Furthermore, like Leigh, the protagonist in Dear Mr. Henshaw, Jack is inspired by the work of a particular author and proceeds to write to him. In this case, the author is Walter Dean Myers.

Throughout the book, several well-known poems are mentioned. I was amused by the reference to the William Carlos Williams poem The Red Wheelbarrow, which my class studied during my sophomore year of high school. The poem reads in its entirety: “so much depends / upon / a red wheel / barrow / glazed with rain / water / beside the white / chickens.” Jack’s reaction to the poem was similar to my own. Why does so much depend on the wheelbarrow? And what makes this one descriptive sentence a poem?

It also brought to mind the Guy Noir sketch on Prairie Home Companion in which poet laureate Billy Collins assists Guy Noir in apprehending the distributor of numerous shoddy imitations of several Williams poems, most prominently This is Just to Say. For instance: “This is just to say / I have buried your cat / which you left with me for the weekend / and which you were expecting to pick up on Monday. / Forgive me. / She was dead. / So stiff / and starting to smell funky.” Jack’s imitation of The Red Wheelbarrow is the first of many in this book, leading up to his revelation of the poem written in mimicry of Myers’ Love That Boy.

I recognized most of the poems in Love That Dog, and those familiar allusions added to my enjoyment of a book which is simultaneously a very quick read and a very moving story. This is a book about poetry and its power to help those who write it to work through even the most painful of circumstances. Along with that, it’s the simple tale of a boy and the dog that he adores, making this a winner for the literarily minded and animal lovers alike.