Let's Hear It for the Horses

Praise for Let's Hear It for the Horses: If you know your totem animal is Horse, you'll see these gentle giants everywhere-in the history of war, on gas-station calendars, haunting memories of harvest, a father's fall, and your own hand's memory of dusty withers. These poems will take you into a life enhanced by horses, as every life should be by something friendly but not defeated. -Kim Stafford, author of Singer Come from Afar, Oregon Poet Laureate Emeritus It's a great pleasure to browse this collection, just as Tricia Knoll's horses browse the field, looking for new, green blades of grass. She writes in the fine tradition of Maxine Kumin, and like that earlier poet, even has a poem for a horse named Jack . Full of the breathtaking observations of the horse lover, Knoll takes the reader close to real and imagined horses-close enough to feel the tickle of their whiskers or notice the green spit on their lips. She also shares stories of the father who died before she was grown, but who guided her into life by taking her as a child on trail rides, or to see the Lipizzaner horses. You don't have to know horses to love these poems; they can serve as a generous introduction to the joy and sadness that canters in the air beside them. -Judith Barrington, author of Long Love: New & Selected Poems, 1985-2017 This book, with craft and saddles and the warm breath, takes me into my past, one horse-girl to another. Tricia Knoll has found her inspiration on horseback, in the giddy-up, and the pure wild gold, until the dangerous day I die. The naming of horses in Roll Call just about takes my breath away. -Joan Logghe, Santa Fe Poet Laureate Emerita