Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been

Chase Twichell

Publishers Weekly called Twichell “a major voice in contemporary poetry,” and this long-overdue retrospective supports the claim. Selected from six award-winning books, this volume collects the best of Twichell’s meditative and startling poems and includes a book-length selection of new work. A longtime student of Zen Buddhism, Twichell probes how the “self” changes over time, and how the perception of self affects the history and meaning of our lives. Her poems exhibit a deep and urgent love of the natural world amidst ecological decimation, while also delving into childhood memories and the surprise and nourishment that come from radical shifts in perception, be it from the death of loved ones or spiritual epiphany.

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ISBN: 9781556593185

Format: Paperback

Useless Islands

I’m trying to remember
what happened when love overtook me,

how the old self slipped
from its hard boundaries

like a ripe plum out of its skin.
It’s a personal mystery.

It was August, each moment
setting fire to the next,

the woods already
bloodied by the first bright deaths.

I’m trying to remember, but there’s
a blacked-out part to the story,

a steep, crashing wall of seawater,
a long thrill of fear. I was dragged

in an undertow as if out of sleep,
and the blue-green light I swam toward

was this paradise of islands,
these green days spilled

across a vast mercurial blue.
We lie in a flood of white sand

under the broken prism of the sky,
watching its fragile rays disappear

down the secretive avenues of palms.
How long can we lie here?

The luminous charcoal and manila clouds
cross like fish overhead.

His hand sleeps on my thigh.
The ratcheted voices of the tree frogs

start up their random music,
and we lie listening. It’s a way

of passing more slowly through,
of dragging a stick in the water

like a brake. There’s the dull
clop of goats on the red dirt road,

and the lisp of the sand beneath us.
What the leaves were saying

back in the other life,
the palms are saying here.

It’s the words to the long slow sad
familiar hymn about the hourglass.

I lie beside my love
in the silence between two waves,

the grains of my body pouring.
I know that the second wave will ripen

and fall. It will fall in a world
that is emerald and sapphire,

lit by the sparks of the sea. A world
that will darken and abandon me.

About the Author

Chase Twichell has published eight books of poetry, most recently Things As It Is and Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been: New and Selected Poems, which won both the Kingsley Tufts Poetry Award from Claremont Graduate University and the Balcones Poetry Prize from Austin Community College. She has received fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Artists Foundation, and the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. After teaching for many years, she left academia to start Ausable Press, …

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Reviews

“To read a well done ‘selected poems’ is to follow a life, and we find that here as we watch the poet grow from one in love with thought and language to one who quietly yet intensely contemplates the world by leaning toward the essential. Hers is a world of wounded beauty which she confronts and records for us.” —New York Journal of Books

“Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been shows Twichell to be an ever-dark, deep, sonorous, serious, and changing voice.” —Rain Taxi

“At its core, Horses Where the Answers Should Have Been is a collection of sacred moments, moments in which Twichell deftly turns the mundane into poetry.” —Tricycle: The Buddhist Review

“[Twichell’s] work of the new century… proffer[s] one astonishing poem after another. She is writing at ‘the height of her powers,’ as the cliché goes. In fact, she is writing at the depth, the width, of her powers. Every poem is necessary.” —Salamander