The Horse and Rider
by Louise Glück
Once there was a horse, and on the horse there was a rider. How
handsome they looked in the autumn sunlight, approaching a
strange city! People thronged the streets or called from the high
windows. Old women sat among flower pots. But when you looked
about for another horse or another rider, you looked in vain. My
friend, said the animal, why not abandon me? Alone, you can find
your way here. But to abandon you, said the other, would be to
leave a part of myself behind, and how can I do that when I do not
know which part you are?
From Faithful and Virtuous Night. Reproduced with kind permission from Carcanet.
Forward Prizes for Poetry
Shortlisted for Best Collection 2014
Faithful and Virtuous Night
Louise Glück
About Louise Glück
Louise Glück (b. 1943 New York City), has written poetry for as long as she can remember. She was US Poet Laureate from 2003-4 and has won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the William Carlos Williams Award. As a child with ‘a premature sense of vocation’, she was inspired by Blake’s Songs of Innocence and songs from Shakespeare’s plays. As a teenager, she sent off manuscripts to publishers. ‘It was good practice,’ she says, ‘that decade of rejection.’
Faithful and Virtuous Night took five years to write: when stuck, she would turn to the very short stories of Kafka for inspiration. She finds DH Lawrence’s ‘great, imperfect poems’ encouraging and draws from the work of younger poets and her own students.
Her advice to would-be poets: ‘Persist. Stay, or become, capable of change. Trust what seems an adventure however confusing.’
