Interview by Zoë Brigley
“The beginning of a poem matters to me very much. I want to pull the reader right into the thicket. My favourite poems are those that snag me from the first line and make it impossible to pull myself free.”
Hobson’s choice
The surgeon gestured to the horse nearest the door. She raised her head, one lid a shutter lifting to reveal a large green eye. Her lashes made her bashful. Take it or leave it, he said, but know there’s no bringing her back. She lowered her head and with it her lid as if knowing I’d stick with what I had. I circled the stable for hours, recalling the rope, its heft around her neck. When half the day is dark, I’ll think again of that sad horse and how her tangled mane fell like a curtain over one green eye.
Hobson’s choice is a choice that seems to be free, but there is only really one choice that can be made. Here the choice seems to be whether to take the horse or not, and maybe poetry is a fitting place for a complex moment like this? We definitely feel the narrator’s difficulty.
Yes, poetry itself becomes a holding place for complexity, a place where difficult feelings and contexts need not be resolved, but stayed in and with. When faced with the impossibility of a ‘take it or leave it’ scenario – the archetypal Hobson’s choice – especially one in which the stakes for loss are high, we can feel halted by fear and indecision. There is only one option on the table, one horse on offer – and here the question of whether or not to take the horse stands in for a choice that is inarticulable for its anguish – but, walking away from the horse carries its own risk, its own prospect of loss. We can feel choices, Hobson’s or otherwise, to be agonising. I wanted both to contain and communicate that agony in this poem.
I love the way that this poem begins in medias res, in the middle of things. We are thrown straight into the scene. Do you spend a long time thinking about the beginnings of poems?
The beginning of a poem matters to me very much. I want to pull the reader right into the thicket. My favourite poems are those that snag me from the first line and make it impossible to pull myself free. I tend to begin writing with a first line that is already there in my head, or a last line from which I can work backwards.
In this poem, I have a strong sense of the personhood of the horse, that we cannot simply relegate it to creature status. Do you often write about nature or the more-than-human?
Yes, and in this poem, the horse is more than its creature-self, embodying a loss that is difficult to name for its complexity and pain. There is so much tenderness felt towards the horse, by the narrator and hopefully the reader too, not only for the agony she represents, but also for what, or who, she becomes in the poem – precisely by being asked to stand in for something too painful to name. She is vulnerable. She is full of longing. She is in need of protection. She evokes a desire to rescue her, an ache of compassion, and she is not forgotten by those who walk away from her.