Re: The Horse Knows the Way

Last night I was enjoying the early poems, all I've read so far, in Dave Margoshes' The Horse Knows the Way, his new book of poems. These early poems re-figure or fill in a speaker's boyhood most engagingly.

At that point I put the book down.

I found myself--I wish I could stop there--thinking of Wallace Stegner's musings on how the past "utters and affirms us" (I think was how he put it). That's what the Margoshes poems were doing: going back over material from the past, re-membering it, filling in and thus affirming or building up the speaker.

It's a filling in of blanks, I reckoned, not unlike the filling in of basements, the laying of streets. In Hillsdale now certain areas long vacant, like the field behind Calder where the Riders used to practice, are filling in with high-density development.

Field becomes city, boyhood becomes poem, city becomes field for poem, and so on.