“Goat-Footed Gods” by Kathleen Driskell

Goat-Footed Gods (Carnegie Mellon 2025) by Kathleen Driskell is a superb, evocative, and magical collection of poems that track both reality and myth, beauty and violence, life and morality, and nature in its many guises. It’s a rare collection of poems, both haunting and hauntingly beautiful from an award-winning Kentucky poet. From the moment of the opening poem about Pan, the ancient Greek god, readers are invited into a diverse world of wonder, perception, and reflection, a world created by a poet who sees well beyond the ordinary. With lines like “You weren’t made for this / world, yet here you are,” this first poem, “Goat-Footed God,” introduces readers to a mythical theme that runs throughout the collection.

While Driskell writes poems from her own viewpoint, several of the most compelling poems are written in the voice of the Goatman, an infamous Kentucky cryptid who purportedly lurks in the woods near the ninety-foot-tall railroad trestle of Pope Lick Creek. He is rumored to lure his victims onto the trestle to meet their deaths by falling or being struck by an incoming train. An excerpt at the beginning of the book quotes the 1916 Washington Post as saying: “this satyr holds the tragic distinction of being one of the most dangerous mythical animals in North America.”

Despite his reputed violent nature, the Goatman is sometimes revealed in sympathetic visions as in the three poems with “Hymn” in the titles. In “Hymn of the Goatman No. 1,” filled with evocative images of lushness and nature, this Goatman observes: “On either side of me, / higher than the horns on my head, sedge / is beginning to winter, its mauve feathery  / fingers reaching out to tickle, and / goldenrod, too, and thorny thistle gone so purple this time of year.”  In “Hymn of the Goatman No. 2,” this mythical creature observes: “I squat at the waterside with a deer mother, / velvety soft, her ears twitching.” In “Hymn of the Goatman No. 3,” the Goatman shares: “Had I been king of the gods, / and not simply regarded as a foppish prince, /  I’d have waved a wand to make it all / merry.”

Yet for all these sympathetic renderings of this creature, he is also depicted quite the opposite too, and in this way, Driskell captures the yin and yang and duality of not just the Goatman, but perhaps all of life. In the poem, “The Trestle Is Haunted,” she writes:

The trestle is haunted by a Goat –

man. He is not carrying a bible,

nor any sacred book, nor is he

wearing a priest’s collar. He’s not

wearing clothes at all, his eyes are

not blue like Jesus’, he has no hair

though he is covered in fur, and

gnats circle his head and horns

like a gnarly halo. Some say he swings

a bloody axe.

While the Goatman has a prominent place in the poems, there are poems which appear to focus on Driskell’s own life and reflections. In these, too, she captures the duality, especially with regard to what C. Van Woodward called the “burden of Southern history.” In “Confederate Cemetery,” for instance, Driskell writes:

Something I’d read must have helped me

realize the bones under my feet were

on the wrong side of it all, how else

would I have known, along with the slurs

at the dinner table, my neighborhood,

sprung up recently as a white asylum

from school desegregation, that things

were not as they said they were?

 

Still, in a house filled with shouting

and threats and heaved plates (the offending

meatloaf sliding down the wall, leaving

a wet smear as if a traitor had just been

executed in our kitchen), I solaced in

the tidiness, …

With over ninety poems to relish, many with enticing titles like “The Girl Who Became a Tree,” readers will be enchanted by the depth and variety of these exquisite poems. A rich, lush collection by Driskell, these poems call for study as well as enjoyment. Her images are vivid and inviting, and many poems have an atmospheric quality inviting readers into the sheer lushness of Southern flora and fauna as well as the myths and realities of Southern history.

Kathleen Driskell

Driskell has written five other poetry collections, and she currently lives in an old church in Louisville, Kentucky, and serves as the chair of the Graduate School of Writing at Spalding University. Her poems and essays have been published in The New Yorker, River Teeth, Southern Review, Shenandoah, Appalachian Review, and other literary magazines.