Mare's Nest

August 25, 2023

Springing from her years growing up on a horse farm in Kentucky, the memoirlike free-verse poems in this first collection from the Amy Award--winning Mitchell are powered by visceral images related to breeding and raising horses, with the most evocative ones depicting mares giving birth. At the end of the collection, she provides a glossary of equine veterinary words she uses, "old and concrete but rarely inscrutable, a treasure trove for a poet," that inspired her to write poetry and whose sounds appealed to her are vivid and muscular. For instance, one of the horses is "ewe-necked," an evocative term describing a genetic deformity that causes a depression on neck. Another horse is "fescue-footed" which means that the horse isn't able to walk properly because it has eaten a fungus growing on fescue grass--another expression that sounds like a metaphor and the basis for a poem. One of the most vivid poems refers to the alpha female who steps out from the herd, "sixteen hands tall," and who hasn't "given birth or let go/ of her sense of order yet." VERDICT Ultimately, Mitchell's language is reminiscent of Dylan Thomas's "Fern Hill" and draws from a similar source: life bursting forth on the farm beside an undercurrent of death. As Thomas's famed line says, "Time held me green and dying/ Though I sang in my chains like the sea."--Diane Scharper

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