New and Selected Poems 1971-2010
Poetry | $22.95/$25.95 in Canada | Trade Paper | 978-1-55643-962-9 | 310 pp.
Forthcoming: April 5, 2011
Wild Horses, Wild Dreams follows a trajectory from the early seventies to the present, giving a generous overview of Lindy Hough’s poetic world in emotionally evocative language. The book contains substantial work from Hough’s four early books, Changing Woman, Psyche, The Sun in Cancer, and Outlands & Inlands, plus new poems from recent years.
The poems show a delight in language and the transformative nature of art, grounded in place, and sensuous detail. The narrator of Changing Woman is a young mother in her early twenties, steeped in the rigors of life, questioning and ironic as she puzzles out truth and authenticity in Colorado and on the coast of Maine in surprisingly isolated circumstances.
In Psyche, she maps the inner life of a Vermont college town and its inhabitants, following the form and content of H.D.’s Helen In Egypt, which undertook to portray Helen of Troy’s view of the Trojan War. In The Sun in Cancer, Hough shows a delight with the leveling power of Buddhism in the exploration of consciousness, and digs deep into the life of the village of Plainfield, Vermont. Delight with her first child reinforces a hunger for learning, mirrored in the learning of the young child: “Learner, you are teaching me so much.”
Outlands & Inlands is written in Maine, Vermont and northern California. It questions language, authenticity, local cultures, and assumptions about truth and fidelity, in an attempt to reconcile opposites.
In the new poems, Hough continues her account of an attempt to square external reality with inner growth. Human dynamics are thrown up against a historical reckoning with contemporary life. Linguistic nuance and an attention to syntax are grounded by the breath poetics of projective verse.
Advanced praise for Wild Horses, Wild Dreams:
Language, as Snyder reminded us way back in the day, is a wild system. A wilderness. And Lindy Hough follows her words along the path of the poem. She trusts the poem and her ear, taking refuge in the language we’re given. I’m delighted to follow along, as the poems pick a way through intellectual, cultural and personal histories. They are hers, but mine too. These wild horses, these wild dreams—she’s become wise in the making of her poems.
—Bobby Byrd
In Wild Horses, Wild Dreams, the poet’s eye wanders, and collides with the mind. In the natural world, the web of human relations, and the conundrums of philosophical inquiry, Hough wages battle with the mirrors of illusion. What she sees is rarely what she thinks; senses and intellect play their tricks. Over time, the task gets simpler and deeper. Constructing meaning from gardens, marriage, motherhood, meditation, and movement until there is “a self one can live with,” Hough reminds us what it is to search and ultimately to find.
—Summer Brenner
Lindy Hough’s late poems fulfill this book and bring to mind her earlier purposes, whittled down now to an extraordinary quiet sense of presence. Nothing sanctimonious; nothing itching for more. Just more this. Reading in sequence poems from many years of her life, we overhear promises she made—to language, to stay true— and see how she’s kept them. It’s not easy to stay true when your fable is everyday life. Her life is full of quick motion, oblique meetings, desperate accommodations. She reminds us she is a dancer—the one artist who is only at home all over the place. For all the dance, there is Yankee toughness here, chilling blunt beauty. We’ve waited a long time for this collection, and it’s worth the wait.
—Robert Kelly
