Customer Reviews

Hoofprints: Horse Poems

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Adapted from a review that appeared in the Brattleboro Reformer:

"Saddle up," says the poet, "ride back with me," and in a few short lines we travel back "past buckboard wagons, buffalo hunts.../ and every sort of infidel invader," until we reach such an ancient time that horses aren't creatures to ride anymore. Then we walk,

45 million years or so,
our brown-spotted companions
pattering beside us,
on an ever-increasing number
of toes.

Toes? Yes. It's just one of the fascinating details in Hoofprints: Horse Poems, by Jessie Haas. Beginning around the time of the dinosaurs, it follows the evolution and history of horses and humanity up to the present day. Along the way, it offers readers an intensely personal view of history. In `Riding with the Horde,' for example, we don't just learn about Genghis Kahn, we become part of his army in a "long brown river of horses," caught up in a rhythm of riding and conquest that seems to have no end.

There are many sad moments in these poems, but joyful ones too. When we see the ancient riders on the Asian steppe, their gold-trimmed clothing "Catching sun, / Like a million cobwebs on a morning meadow," we understand the freedom and power people sought when they first began to ride. That longing echoes through a later poem, `Big Top,' about a North American boy and a circus horse whose separate notions of freedom intersect then move apart, "widening farther and farther / into the unknown."

The beautiful design of this book is worthy of its content, and it would be a wonderful gift for a lover of poetry, horses, or history. It's also perfect for use in the classroom, and it should inspire some interesting social studies projects.

Jeanne Walsh is Reference Librarian at Brooks Memorial Library in Brattleboro, Vermont.

Jessie Haas, Hoofprints: Horse Poems (Harper Collins, 2004)

I have a weakness for all things horse, and I love poetry, so this was a no-brainer when I saw it at the used bookstore. I have to say, I give a lot more slack to all things horse than I do to all things poetry, and I was kind of hoping-- since I take it as a given that all single-author poetry collections that revolve around a specific subject are going to be substandard poetry-- that my inner editor's laxity about horses would carry over to horse poetry. Alas, it was not to be. I love the history in here, and the research Jessie Haas did in preparing to write this book. I am somewhat less enthusiastic about the end result.

Poetry is that art of "show, don't tell" distilled, a medium where every word, every syllable, should be laden (and/or pregnant) with meaning, where description needs to be pared away like the white of an orange, and for much the same reason-- if you cook with it, it will give the whole dish a bitter, unappealing taste. Far too many poets don't understand this. (And mentioning it gives me a change to beat my favorite dead horse, W. D. Snodgrass' wonderful book De/Compositions, which shows this better than I ever could, and which should be required reading for all poets, aspiring, pro, or in between.) Haas is one of them:

"I want you to know that history is not what you have been told.
You have been asked to pledge allegiance to certain facts,
And that is a misuse of schooling, to teach you only phrases,
A lulling rhythm to rock your mind to sleep."
("Is That So?")

Those of you who have been reading my reviews for the past twenty years are well-used to my charge of "that's not poetry, that's political screed chopped up into little lines." So I don't even have to get up on that soapbox again, I'm sure.

This is not to say that the whole book is scraping the bottom of that particular barrel; when Haas gets her mind around an image, she does know what to do with it. There are a few pieces in here that are really workable. If you're not a horse fanatic, though, you're probably going to find yourself slogging through too many swine to get to far too few (for a 200-page book, roughly two and a half times as long as the usual single-author non- "selected" or "collected" book of poetry) pearls. **