The amazon blurb says it is “neither homage nor criticism”, but it feels like both. Presumably the recurring figure of an escaped horse is in reference to Stevens’ claim that “Time is a horse that runs in the heart, a horse / Without a rider on a road at night. / The mind sits listening and hears it pass”. Near the close of this long poem, the authors say “there’s nothing abstract, miracle body of beauty, of power… the mind can barely think it; / it beats and beats deep inside all…”.
It feels like a lament, that time and Stevens’ poems take us away from the “heart” itself, a moral entity
The crux isn’t how I looked in the poem before last
but who I was and whether I still hold myself culpable…
The poem is unusual, wild, willful even, without being showy. Reznikoff seems to be a surprise foil, and Pound and Williams are mentioned in passing “to write about the normal in a normal way’s better”.
The meaning of the poem seems elusive but isn’t; its music – the sound of a horse bolting – the opposite.