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!
Morning Stables
Awk, Awk, Awk. Crows come in
angry with the day.
Cows complain of weaning
but I, who grew up at a console
black and white TV
and wished to be
not Dale Evans
but her dun–
or at least to keep a horse
garaged beside my father’s car–
again consider
how this lavender
will pale into another dollar day,
half a minute, maybe,
less than yesterday
but still serious and blue.
Dew dampening my boots,
I lead two horses in: easy-gaited,
no injuries last night.
Here I am.
It’s how I really live– horses all around.
Posted May 26, 2020
Stride for Stride: A Country Life, Wendell Hawken’s latest collection of poetry for foxhunters, is available from the author.