Stride for Stride: A Country Life, Bartley Books, an imprint of Three Pounds Press, Millwood, Virginia, 2020, paper, cover art by Anita Baarns, 70 pp, 43 poems. Available from the author.This slim, award-winning volume of forty-three poems by Wendell Hawken speaks of horses, foxhounds, and country life. Writing with authority on hunting, scent, whelping, riding, animal husbandry, and woodlore, Wendy conjures vivid mental images easily recognized and pleasurably savored by foxhunters who have ‘been there.’ Several of the poems have been previously published in Foxhunting Life, eliciting high praise from readers and establishing this author, in my view, as the most prolific, talented, and serious writer of sporting poetry of the present time.
Wendy's poem, "Morning Stables," from this collection will resonate with horsemen and horsewomen who have tended their own, and will jiggle old memories especially of those who were favored with the horse gene as children, and no one else really understood!
