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Kentucky Voices
Next Door to the Dead: Poems
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 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.
- GenresPoetryLiterary Fiction
102 pages, Paperback
First published June 29, 2015
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Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
July 13, 2023
A-
After purchasing a home next to a small churchyard cemetery, Kathleen Driskell begins to explore the graveyard next door. Next Door to the Dead is a reflection of that exploration.
Driskell imagines the lives of the names on the cemetery's tombstones. Who were these people? What were their lives like? Using context clues such as epitaphs, Driskell creates stories about her deceased neighbors. Through these stories, Driskell explores social issues such as racism and sexism in a language that is easy to read and poetic.
By blending local history, legends, and landscapes with her musings, Driskell paints a portrait unique to Kentucky. Some of my favorite poems in Next Door to the Dead are of local legends Harland Sanders ("Epitaph: For Colonel Sanders" and "At Harland Sanders Grave") and Tchaenhotep.
"At Harland Sanders Grave" imagines what it was like to be the wife of the Kentucky Fried Chicken baron.
"and his wife,
Claudia,"
the inscription reads
at the base
as if they'd said,
fuck it, let's just
throw her bones
into this old bucket.
"Tchaenhotep" imagines the life of the eponymous mummy housed in the Kentucky Science Center, from her life to her death to her afterlife and her trip from Egypt to Kentucky.
In another poem, "Epitaph: For the Gravedigger," Driskell imagines the life of a gravedigger before reflecting on the one grave in the cemetery he didn't have to dig -- his own.
Next Door to the Dead is a lyrically-written exploration of life and death wrapped in a bluegrass burial shroud. As macabre as it is poignant. I cannot recommend Next Door to the Dead enough.
After purchasing a home next to a small churchyard cemetery, Kathleen Driskell begins to explore the graveyard next door. Next Door to the Dead is a reflection of that exploration.
Driskell imagines the lives of the names on the cemetery's tombstones. Who were these people? What were their lives like? Using context clues such as epitaphs, Driskell creates stories about her deceased neighbors. Through these stories, Driskell explores social issues such as racism and sexism in a language that is easy to read and poetic.
By blending local history, legends, and landscapes with her musings, Driskell paints a portrait unique to Kentucky. Some of my favorite poems in Next Door to the Dead are of local legends Harland Sanders ("Epitaph: For Colonel Sanders" and "At Harland Sanders Grave") and Tchaenhotep.
"At Harland Sanders Grave" imagines what it was like to be the wife of the Kentucky Fried Chicken baron.
"and his wife,
Claudia,"
the inscription reads
at the base
as if they'd said,
fuck it, let's just
throw her bones
into this old bucket.
"Tchaenhotep" imagines the life of the eponymous mummy housed in the Kentucky Science Center, from her life to her death to her afterlife and her trip from Egypt to Kentucky.
In another poem, "Epitaph: For the Gravedigger," Driskell imagines the life of a gravedigger before reflecting on the one grave in the cemetery he didn't have to dig -- his own.
Next Door to the Dead is a lyrically-written exploration of life and death wrapped in a bluegrass burial shroud. As macabre as it is poignant. I cannot recommend Next Door to the Dead enough.
October 22, 2015
“Tawdry” is a great word, a mimetic word, a word that fills the mouth, a word I encountered with delight in Kathleen Driskell’s poem called “The Mower” where it turns out to be the perfect choice to describe offerings a father removes each week from his son’s grave.
The word is right in its meaning. (showy and cheap), in its place at the end of the line, and in its sound, a groaning “aw” that echoes the “slow moan” of the riding mower that wakes the Poet each Saturday, as the father and an unidentified “she” [I infer a girlfriend] assert opposing modes of grief. “It was she, he said, who had sent the ruined / boy up the ramp and into the black mouth // of the Army’s transport plane.” The music is subtler here, modulating to liquid “r” alliteration and the balancing half-rhyming diphthongs “ui” and “ou.”
In his book Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Scribner, 1998), Kenneth Koch suggests that poets speak a special language called “poetry,” a sort of subset of the mother tongue, be it French or English, Arabic or Hebrew. An important component of the language of poetry is music. Song enhances meaning in poetry. To adapt an example from Koch, to say “I’m having suicidal thoughts” just isn’t the same as saying “To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Driskell speaks fluent poetry, meaning and music mingling as we are reminded that the Mower will never succeed in controlling constantly resurrecting life.
“Poetry,” says Koch, “would just as soon come to a musical, as to a logical or otherwise useful conclusion . . .” The Poet, watching this drama play out in sympathy and as witness, seems to conclude that the best end that can be hoped for is stasis as “she” always leaves, “what next Saturday the mower is sure / to pitch up atop the high pile of clippings and rubbish.” The music resolves; the story is left open-ended.
Driskell is frequently droll, even when she is (forgive me) deadly serious. It might be said she has a twinkle in her eye, if that wasn’t such a cliché. Nothing about Driskell is clichéd. It’s not every woman who would live in a decommissioned church, let alone one with attached graveyard. Even fewer would write a collection of poems about it.
I don’t know how Protestants de-sanctify a church. Catholics have a ritual for it, of course, but I guess Protestants just sell them. In Driskell’s case, the sale was handled by the preacher.
He must have been a Baptist preacher because the young couple soon discover that, to be charitable, the preacher was confused. “. . . we’d only lived there a month, / were still washing dishes in the ladies’ room / sink, when I drove home in sleet to find / a hearse . . . the casket sliding out. / I slid in . . .” Seems there is always room for one more in a graveyard.
Comparisons to the Spoon River Anthology practically make themselves and I will leave them to it. Although the book has a series of poems titled “Epitaph,” Driskell casts her net wider, in geography, time, and culture. We hear from soldiers who died in the Civil War and in one of our many concurrent current conflicts. We visit the grave of Harland Sanders (and as a sort of afterthought, that of his wife), a snake handler and his snake, African American slaves, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who has second thoughts about his grand romantic gesture), an Egyptian mummy riding the flooded Ohio in her box, and a crow fallen in a path. I am particularly fond of “Epitaph: Wife of Proud Buck Shallcross” for its allusion to a classic and long-time favorite:
This seven-line poem is both sinister and funny. Several poems are too short to quote but their titles convey their intent: “Epitaph: Dear Departed Dave, He Chased a Bear into a Cave.”
In her essay “Laugh While You Can" (Poetry), Kay Ryan says “I have always felt that much of the best poetry is funny.” She sees “something nonsensical in the heart of poetry” and reminds us that the distance between Krazy Kat's being bonked with a brick (and thinking it a gesture of love) and a poem like Emily Dickinson’s “The Morning after Woe” is considerably shorter than we have been led to believe.
Ryan writes "What is it but nonsense that has taken the grave weight of . . . Dickinson’s poems—. . . —and has left them weightless? Because if these poems, or a Shakespeare sonnet or a dark sonnet by Donne, had not had their arguments undone somehow, they would indeed crash upon our heads like hammers. "
Nevertheless, it is the rare poet who can write poems that are serious and poems that are seriously funny. Driskell is one of them.
Here is my disclosure. I know Driskell and I’m a fan.
. . . a Wildcats flag,
a blue sash that reads This We’ll Defend,
a solar light that blinks at night, a tawdry
bouquet of plastic yellow tulips
The word is right in its meaning. (showy and cheap), in its place at the end of the line, and in its sound, a groaning “aw” that echoes the “slow moan” of the riding mower that wakes the Poet each Saturday, as the father and an unidentified “she” [I infer a girlfriend] assert opposing modes of grief. “It was she, he said, who had sent the ruined / boy up the ramp and into the black mouth // of the Army’s transport plane.” The music is subtler here, modulating to liquid “r” alliteration and the balancing half-rhyming diphthongs “ui” and “ou.”
In his book Making Your Own Days: The Pleasures of Reading and Writing Poetry (Scribner, 1998), Kenneth Koch suggests that poets speak a special language called “poetry,” a sort of subset of the mother tongue, be it French or English, Arabic or Hebrew. An important component of the language of poetry is music. Song enhances meaning in poetry. To adapt an example from Koch, to say “I’m having suicidal thoughts” just isn’t the same as saying “To be or not to be, that is the question.”
Driskell speaks fluent poetry, meaning and music mingling as we are reminded that the Mower will never succeed in controlling constantly resurrecting life.
And no matter how close the mower shaves
around impediments, a green live fringe
circling each monument remains, won’t be
edited out, can’t be cut to the ground . . .
“Poetry,” says Koch, “would just as soon come to a musical, as to a logical or otherwise useful conclusion . . .” The Poet, watching this drama play out in sympathy and as witness, seems to conclude that the best end that can be hoped for is stasis as “she” always leaves, “what next Saturday the mower is sure / to pitch up atop the high pile of clippings and rubbish.” The music resolves; the story is left open-ended.
Driskell is frequently droll, even when she is (forgive me) deadly serious. It might be said she has a twinkle in her eye, if that wasn’t such a cliché. Nothing about Driskell is clichéd. It’s not every woman who would live in a decommissioned church, let alone one with attached graveyard. Even fewer would write a collection of poems about it.
I don’t know how Protestants de-sanctify a church. Catholics have a ritual for it, of course, but I guess Protestants just sell them. In Driskell’s case, the sale was handled by the preacher.
The Preacher who sold us the old church
said Pshaw! Ain’t nobody been buried there
in years, no fears, that little cemetery’s been full
up long ago
(“Living Next to the Dead Acre”)
He must have been a Baptist preacher because the young couple soon discover that, to be charitable, the preacher was confused. “. . . we’d only lived there a month, / were still washing dishes in the ladies’ room / sink, when I drove home in sleet to find / a hearse . . . the casket sliding out. / I slid in . . .” Seems there is always room for one more in a graveyard.
Comparisons to the Spoon River Anthology practically make themselves and I will leave them to it. Although the book has a series of poems titled “Epitaph,” Driskell casts her net wider, in geography, time, and culture. We hear from soldiers who died in the Civil War and in one of our many concurrent current conflicts. We visit the grave of Harland Sanders (and as a sort of afterthought, that of his wife), a snake handler and his snake, African American slaves, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who has second thoughts about his grand romantic gesture), an Egyptian mummy riding the flooded Ohio in her box, and a crow fallen in a path. I am particularly fond of “Epitaph: Wife of Proud Buck Shallcross” for its allusion to a classic and long-time favorite:
Now—and forever—here lies my Ruby,
just as she did during this earthly life.
This seven-line poem is both sinister and funny. Several poems are too short to quote but their titles convey their intent: “Epitaph: Dear Departed Dave, He Chased a Bear into a Cave.”
In her essay “Laugh While You Can" (Poetry), Kay Ryan says “I have always felt that much of the best poetry is funny.” She sees “something nonsensical in the heart of poetry” and reminds us that the distance between Krazy Kat's being bonked with a brick (and thinking it a gesture of love) and a poem like Emily Dickinson’s “The Morning after Woe” is considerably shorter than we have been led to believe.
Ryan writes "What is it but nonsense that has taken the grave weight of . . . Dickinson’s poems—. . . —and has left them weightless? Because if these poems, or a Shakespeare sonnet or a dark sonnet by Donne, had not had their arguments undone somehow, they would indeed crash upon our heads like hammers. "
Nevertheless, it is the rare poet who can write poems that are serious and poems that are seriously funny. Driskell is one of them.
Here is my disclosure. I know Driskell and I’m a fan.
March 22, 2025
I liked this poem:
Epitaph
"Dear Departed Dave
He Chased a Bear into a Cave
'Dear' meaning here
'oh, bless his heart,'
which is our way
In the South
of saying poor, poor Dave,
he really wasn't
all that smart."
Epitaph
"Dear Departed Dave
He Chased a Bear into a Cave
'Dear' meaning here
'oh, bless his heart,'
which is our way
In the South
of saying poor, poor Dave,
he really wasn't
all that smart."
June 9, 2019
A really remarkable book of poetry. A mix of pathos, bittersweet, humor (very wry and wonderful).
August 1, 2019
Amazing, charming, clever, thoughtful, loving. A treasure.
February 17, 2023
Beautifully written, funny, and heartbreaking.
March 23, 2023
My true rating is like a 1 star, BUT that is because I don’t really like poetry. This author had an interesting collection and some were good.
May 19, 2024
This was a fast read. My favorite from the book was "Love Poetry" which described Dante Gabriel Rossetti's love and love lost. Very interesting theme for a book of poems.
September 29, 2025
Very unique premise for a poem book, I loved every story.
May 14, 2026
Not only the living are weighted with regret
September 23, 2016
The narrator in Next Door to the Dead has moved with her family into an old church, where they’ll make their home beside a graveyard they’ve been told has been “full up long ago.” We find this to be not quite true, as new graves are added to the old, and all become a source of fascination to the poet next door.
In “Markers,” Driskell writes of watching a father bury his daughter’s ashes while she hangs laundry on the line “to make it sweet in the first balmy sweep of spring.”
Rarely macabre, sometimes funny, often bittersweet, and sometimes plain old sweet – in the best sense of the word, like spring’s freshening breeze – this collection is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in its ability to make the reader care about the characters-- some living, some dead-- who inhabit this cemetery and these poems. Wilder’s character, Emily, asks the Stage Manager, at the end of his play, whether anyone truly understands the value of life while they are living it, and he answers, “No. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”
Next Door to the Dead shows us that poet Kathleen Driskell understands the value of living, some. And we walk away from this collection valuing life a bit more, too, from remembering that, for all of us, it ends.
In “Markers,” Driskell writes of watching a father bury his daughter’s ashes while she hangs laundry on the line “to make it sweet in the first balmy sweep of spring.”
Rarely macabre, sometimes funny, often bittersweet, and sometimes plain old sweet – in the best sense of the word, like spring’s freshening breeze – this collection is reminiscent of Thornton Wilder’s Our Town in its ability to make the reader care about the characters-- some living, some dead-- who inhabit this cemetery and these poems. Wilder’s character, Emily, asks the Stage Manager, at the end of his play, whether anyone truly understands the value of life while they are living it, and he answers, “No. The saints and poets, maybe – they do some.”
Next Door to the Dead shows us that poet Kathleen Driskell understands the value of living, some. And we walk away from this collection valuing life a bit more, too, from remembering that, for all of us, it ends.
August 6, 2016
Truly loved the writer's prose. It's such a unique perspective and such a creative inspiration. I look forward to reading more of Driskell's writing.
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews