Kathleen Driskell Tends to Mortality in “Goat-Footed Gods” https://ift.tt/l9TZieP
Kathleen Driskell’s poems in Goat-Footed Gods are a lesson in creaturehood, motherhood, and the act of mothering creatures in this world. The voices are many and spatially arranged, capturing events in nature — whether real and local or mythic and imagined. Many poems in the book betray a Keatsian capability in the way they place loss and grief amidst the plenty of life. Others give a sense of freedom, a breaking away from rigid, contractual boundaries drawn by us between truth and myth, myth and reality, love and death, urging the reader to accept and rest in the chaotic order of nature.
The central figure of these poems, the Goatman, is derived from the legends of the Pope Lick Trestle monster, a cryptid believed to be part goat and part man, living in the eponymous railroad bridge in Louisville. In Goat-Footed Gods, this figure is seen as who he really is: a creature of another world, much like the creature in Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s short story, “A Very Old Man With Enormous Wings,” cursed and lost in present reality. Never spotted by humans, Driskell’s Goatman is the Greek god Pan, the god of the wild. This conflation works because the Goatman may indeed be read as a keeper of impossible knowledge about our reality (do we live among creatures we’ve never even imagined? Is our reality really not what we think it is?). However, the Goatman is also a sign of the possibility of a transcendent reality (what lies beyond this world?). As a worldly god, the Goatman becomes a potent tool for the many connections between imagination and manifestation that Driskell establishes through these poems.
The monster in Driskell’s world is very real. Curious about the Goatman, at least five young people have died on the bridge, which has a deadly ninety-foot drop at its center. And yet, because it is built on speculation, the local (and national) legend of the Goatman lends itself to the redemptive possibilities that lie at the heart of any legend. It calls attention to aspects of our life or collective experience as humans that never disappear, making them, in a sense, immortal. The four parts in Goat-Footed Gods chart the progression of this coming to terms with mortality, collapsing the hard edges of our lives, and rounding out our experience of it:
this metaphor for the life to come, a seemingly bland perfect sphere, a toy, potential for joy, watered by woe.
Titled “Homonyms” in Part III, this interplay of proximity and allusion is heightened in the sonic relationship between “toy,” “joy,” and “woe.” The focus zeroes in on the ‘o,’ allowing the meaning to travel from “toy” to “joy” (short-distance) and then to “woe” (longer) effortlessly. This movement charts an ouroboric graph, where joys are devoured by woes and vice versa. This message — a truism elevated to augury in Driskell’s hands — is the essence of the mortal condition.
Among the many voices that proliferate in the collection, two emerge as central: the voice of the mother and that of the mother-creature. Part III brings the grieving mother in closer proximity to the creature — the anomaly that exists beyond the divided sentiments of mortals. The first poem in this part, “Collapse,” describes the trauma of the mother of an injured child: “Isn’t hurt proportionate to the/ distance one falls?” The last stanza expands on this idea:
me. Attendant. Still dropping. Tumbling violently through the sky toward a field of deep blue snow.
The mother suffers alongside the child — not only metaphorically but “proportionately.” Every moment in time for her is equal to every inch her daughter fell; the hurt is “still dropping” endlessly for as long as the mother lives. The blurring of pain dissolves the boundary between the mother and the daughter, revealing the deeply encoded animal instincts that define caregiving in nature. Read this way, the book’s larger quest becomes clear: to learn how to mother creatures by embracing one’s own creaturehood.
In retrospect, the instinctual motherhood depicted in Part III connects to its conceptualization in Part II. Here, the transformation into a mother-creature is still unfolding. Hints of it surface in poems like “Pathetic Fallacy,” where the poet finds a dove: “His feathers more like the gray-/ purple that swirls through a puddle of gasoline./ Lovely in its own spoiled way” — and in “Study on Lilac Bush to the Right of Our Porch,” where a moment of hesitation reveals the poet’s shifting relationship with control over nature:
A tiny firetruck, hidden for decades in the grass at the lilac’s brushy feet. Whom among us, I wonder, that we’d favor, anyway, would cut that old lilac back to near nothingness?
Here, nature — both as a landscape and as an evolving maternal state — becomes both nurturing and annihilatory. This echoes the Goatman’s duality as both a symbol of death and an agent of absolution. Ultimately, Driskell suggests that “once this silly god means everything,/ he means nothing particular at all.”
In the last part of the book, caring for the injured and the outcast becomes a love language. In the form of the Goat-footed God and free from fear, love approaches death, encircles it and eventually subsumes it. In “Kandilakia,” the Goat-footed God is shown “tending” to those parts of nature that no one else will look after:
so many gods in these mountains long ago, but only one god left now to mind what needs tending in this vast sore world
Love expands beyond one’s own home to include the outside world and the “vast sore world” of nature itself. Driskell shifts the perception of mortality from something to be feared to something that is simply “tended” to, like life itself.
Toward the end of Goat-Footed Gods, Driskell makes a final offering: multiple voices, multiple creatures, all freed from the fear that mortal love so often carries. Like the goat-footed gods who inhabit these pages and the world outside, the poet suggests that true freedom is found not in resisting mortality but in meeting it with awe. The humor in “Coda,” the vernacular of the outcast, reaffirms life through death. Here, the gods have been dethroned — not by power, but by a mother’s radical acceptance of nature’s cycle. The only thing left to do is live as a child would — fearlessly, freely, “in total awe of the gossamer threads” of life.
POETRY Goat-Footed Gods
By Kathleen Driskell
Carnegie Mellon University Press
Published March 4, 2025
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