Grief and Horses

Patrick Daly indeed writes of both grief and horses (among other animals, all sources of wisdom), but his deeply empathetic poems cover the full range of emotion to arrive at hope.

There is grief, to be sure, in Patrick Daly's new poetry collection, especially associated with the madness of war and its aftermath. And horses, yes, along with many other animals, all with wisdom to offer. But most of all there is language, the love of it and the skillful use of it, as in the opening poem "Words" in which he wishes to learn the language of trees, "But the words of trees / are so large we cannot hear them." Perhaps not, but in Daly's poetry, we nevertheless can sense that wider world. Writing in the foreword to the book, J. David Cummings observes that "Empathy is the rich center of all the poems in this book," the "hidden alchemy" by which Daly works this wonder, such that in the end it is not grief that we take away from these poems, but hope.

Poetry. Literary Nonfiction.