The Hundefräulein Papers is Kathy Mac’s second poetry collection, and it recounts her six-year stint as live-in Hundefräulein (roughly, “dog nanny”) to the numerous dogs of Elisabeth Mann Borgese, the writer, musician, and oceans activist. Mann Borgese, daughter of Nobel laureate Thomas Mann, passed away in 2002, and Mac’s collection is a memoir and an elegy to her friend and former employer. This elegy is generically and tonally diverse, which makes for engaging reading, and is truer to life than an entirely lofty and lugubrious dirge would be. Mac presents a range of texts, including straight lyrics, pastiche poems incorporating passages from Mann Borgese’s numerous works, a recipe for a “doggy birthday cake,” and both a newspaper want ad and obituary that bookend Mac’s relationship with her eccentric employer. The Papers focus largely on the relationship between dogs and their owners, and readers leery of sentimental “pet poems” may groan at the prospect of an entire collection of these. Indeed, a few of Mac’s poems vindicate such wariness; for instance, some pieces in the “Setter Sonnet” sequence, such as “Amanda’s Presents, Returned,” don’t present enough in the way of sonic or semantic craft to interest the reader in the commonplace content. This shortcoming is also present in some passages and poems, such as “Recurring Motifs,” that draw episodes or facts from Mann Borgese’s life. More often, however, Mac’s facility with sound, image and metaphor, as well as her careful control of internal tensions, elevate her subject matter and by turns lend it either humour or solemnity. For instance, in “Setter Sonnet: Serio Mann Borgese, Licensed to Bite,” in order to undercut the almost unavoidable sentimentality required to describe a dog who has lost its master, Mac concludes, “So you stand, eyes cavernous with grief, / or the cogitation of genius, or sleep. It’s so hard to tell.” Not only does the poet express uncertainty as to the dog’s mental state, but calls into question the animal’s capacity for such higher order mental functions altogether. This sonnet is also typical of one of Mac’s most successful structural techniques: that of commencing a poem or section with relatively straightforward description or narration, then concluding with a subtly suggestive metaphor or image that inflects retroactively what came before. This is a common enough technique, but Mac is capable of remarkable subtlety in its execution, as in “The Weight She Bears.” In simple language, this poem imagines Mann Borgese watching the topography of a group of coastal rocks change with the tides until finally, “in between times, one island, turtle shaped— / the turtle that bears the weight of the elephant above it, / the elephant that shoulders the weight of the world.” The “semantic rubbing” that occurs here leads us to associate Elisabeth, who pushed the global community to greater environmentalism, with Hinduism’s Akupara, a giant turtle said to carry the world on its back. This association leads the reader back into the poem, where the simple geological observations take on greater significance. In spite of the few poems and passages where Mac’s craft flags, this collection contains some excellent images and metaphors, and some musical and memorable lines. Even more to Mac’s credit is that over the course of The Hundefräulein Papers the reader comes to care about Mann Borgese and the other residents of the storied “Dog House” at Sambro Head, Nova Scotia.

- Jesse Patrick Ferguson

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 Kathy Mac’s first volume of poetry, Nail Builders Plan for Strength and Growth, won the Gerald Lampert Award for Best First Book of Poems in Canada in 2001 and was subsequently nominated for the Governor General’s Award. An auspicious launch for a first volume.

 Now we have a second volume, and The Hundefräulein Papers is a worthy successor. It bears all the distinguishing Mac marks: experimental audacity; singularity of theme and content; an attractive playfulness admixed with transcendental gravity.

Mac sets the scene: “This book chronicles a period from December 1994 to April 2001, when I lived and worked with Elisabeth Mann Borgese, as well as several days in August of 2001, when I was uncertain whether or not I’d return after a summer away.” That’s the context.

Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1918-2002), the inspiring muse of the volume, was a woman of extraordinary gifts and pedigree. A child of Katya and Thomas Mann (the great German novelist), she was an accomplished classical pianist, animal behaviourist, playwright and short-story writer. She was best known, arguably, as the premier world advocate for the rights and integrity of our oceans. In this capacity she garnered numerous honours, including Germany’s Commander’s Cross of the Order of Merit, the Order of Canada and a nomination for the 2002 Nobel Peace Prize.

Mac, a St. Thomas University English professor, was for many years her hundefräulein or “live-in dog nanny/housekeeper/amanuensis.” The poems or papers constitute an imaginative riff on a life of privilege, complexity, genius and passion.

The Hundefräulein Papers is a potpourri, a gallimaufry, of lyrics, elegies, found poetry, anti-poems, testamentary tributes and personal anecdotes–all sustained by love. This is a love for the immediate subject, the grandmother/artist/advocate Elisabeth Mann Borgese, and love for the dogs that define her world, the world that Borgese shares with Mac.

The special relationship that exists between the poet and the formidable German-turned-Nova Scotian (her home was in Sambro Head in rural Halifax) is nicely captured in the poem Honest Reportage.

Solicitous, curious, ever-observant and loving, Mac is more than a dog nanny or even amanuensis. She is the biographer-in-verse, the astute chronicler, not unaware of the warts, tirelessly admiring of a stoical presence.

The most skilfully executed poem in the volume–deserving of an extended analysis–is Fragmented Epithalamium (in return for W. H. Auden’s ‘Epithalamium’ celebrating Elisabeth Mann’s marriage to Guiseppe Antonio Borgese, November 23, 1939). It is a poem that weaves and cross weaves the lives of several lovers, the life-giving and necessary deceptions, the political madness, the inhuman and constrictive laws, the subtle and covert parallels, the heroic stratagem and the carefully crafted self-disclosures and ambiguities of the poet(s).

And the wonderful footnotes.

It is the plaintive, puzzling and deeply affective Shore Bird that perhaps captures something of the exquisite yet elusive, poignant yet empty, relationship that obtained between the poet and her muse:

”She was Elisabeth. I, the hundefräulein. No More.” That seems so definitive, so cold, so categorical, reminiscent of “a cog, however insignificant, in the glory machine.”

And yet the last verse of Shore Bird speaks to a bond that was deeper than a contract, an agreement:

Nowadays I lament

the rare piper

fragile and tenacious,

who played on the shifting line

between wave and sand.

Like all good elegies the reader is left touched and unsettled. The Hundefräulein Papers is not a trip down memory lane, hagiography, celebrity portrait or self-justifying rumination. It is, rather, an exquisite evocation of a time and a relationship whose mystery is being reverently and rigorously pursued.

Michael W. Higgins is visiting senior executive in residence at Sacred Heart University, Fairfield, Conn. He is a former president of St. Thomas University

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Ever scratched an ear or rubbed a belly upon opening a book? The Hundefräulein Papers, charmingly illustrated by its author, invites us to do so before reading on.
The cover (Kathy Mac morphing into a dappled hound), Living in the Dog House section titles, seven “setter sonnets,” one “not-a-setter” sonnet, and one “more-than-a-setter” sonnet also imply that art’s gone to the dogs. Not so.
Drawings, photos, poetry and prose–a help-wanted ad, an extraordinary recipe, email correspondence, an obituary notice–provide insight into the character of two exceptional women: dog-sitter (now St. Thomas University professor of English) Kathleen McConnell, and her former employer, Elisabeth Mann Borgese (1918-2002)–oceans activist, founding member of the Club of Rome, and Order of Canada recipient.
As early as 1963, Mann Borgese, once executive secretary to the board of Encyclopedia Britannica, predicted a world state: “The earth has become too small, physically and spiritually, to stand divided.” A prolific author, she long affirmed joint management systems are “more important than political boundaries.”
Ironically, Mann Borgese is better known for having taught a dog to play the piano than for her environmentalism.
What’s of primary interest in The Hundefräulein Papers, however, is the negotiation between–and accommodation of–two fiercely independent wills, at least one of whom meets rebellion “with a look borrowed from the sky / pressing down on the ocean’s surface.”
The undertones of Honest Reportage, Relative to Mirabel (the Eeyore of Setters), and Shore Bird, all of which illuminate differences between Mac’s Mrs. Sensible Pearce and Mann Borgese, suggest much remains to be resolved.
Were you smitten by the Blakeian sweep of Tooke, Suitor to the Spectacular Givens from Mac’s first book, Nail Builders Plan for Strength and Growth?
Delight, then, in Hundefräulein’s English setters Isabella, Little Napolean, and Princess (”Such a neck, giraffesque, speckled bitchumen / and ivory; and eyes Dogwood Cove dark”). Delight, too, in the collection’s last words: “. . . I learned from the best // how to chase a shadow through myriad dapples.”
Heed, dear readers, the counsel of Serio Mann Borgese, canine philosopher and double-naught dog. On Social Mobility: “Know your place / to better it; // pee on anyone / who stays too long.” On Resolve: “Don’t bite. // And when you do, / Don’t let go.”
A biography of “rare piper” Elisabeth Mann Borgese would be most welcome. The German-born environmentalist’s cool relationship with her father, Nobel laureate Thomas Mann (author of Death in Venice); empathy for gay brother-in-law W. H. Auden; and marriage to a man 36 years her senior are dangled before us, too soon snatched from view.
The Hundefräulein Papers–a quick, clever sketch–reveals bone country like none other. Few are better qualified to research and render the whole than Kathy Mac.
- reviewed by DIANE REID
For The Daily Gleaner
 

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