After three nonfiction works - "Adam's Task: Calling Animals by Name", "Bandit: Dossier of a Dangerous Dog" and "Animal Happiness" - award-winning writer Vicki Hearne returns to her publishing roots with a new volume of poetry. These 66 poems represent the newest work of a prize-winning poet.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
In her third volume of poetry, Hearne (Nervous Horses), a writer and animal trainer, strives to capture exactly what she knows she can't-the intense immediacy of animal consciousness, a consciousness free of the moral vagaries and intellectual preoccupations that pockmark human experience. Well aware of the contradictory nuances of human thought, she wrestles with these, and with the abilities and disabilities of language. Grammar and syntax are challenged, and challenge us. Her style, smooth in some places, choppy in others, reflects both the wholeness of animal presence and the jarring, fragmentary nature of human reason and reflection. Hearne's poems demand participation, refuse passive enjoyment; she dares the reader to stay in the saddle. She acknowledges the vitality and pure spirituality of our animal companions (a subject eloquently broached by Whitman, Rilke and others before her); she's also prepared to submit joyfully to them. She recognizes that an animal's union of body and spirit, and radical unself-consciousness, represent a quiet, humble superiority over humankind.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
These 66 conversational, learned poems cleverly anatomize the aesthetics of "the parts" of light. Fire, flame, moonlit snow, and starlight reveal the truths that are found by contradiction, the difficulties the mind ("an apparatus") has in comprehending "miracles of landscape," the relationships of the eye to what it sees, and the problem of knowing "like that when for brief moments/At a time we see forever." Intoxicated by Hearne's philosophical perfume, the reader's mind is left delightfully stirred as after drinking absinthe. This collection is never at a loss for a dazzling byway of thought. With the "supple elegance" of a trained equestrian and genuine empathy for all animals, Hearne offers cryptic insights that often lead to "iridescent edges/Of what the world knows." If these edges sometimes vanish "like smoke," the dogs and horses she describes with sophisticated splendor still become living things in the mind. Not for everyone but enjoyable for larger collections.
Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Frank Allen, West Virginia State Coll., Institute
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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