Product Description

Horse and Rider takes its title from a passage in the book of Exodus: ''Sing unto the Lord, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has cast into the sea.'' Melissa Range's poems explore violence and power, particularly as those concepts relate to religion and to the natural world. Her mixture of free and formal verse is populated with warriors, weapons, animals, and figures from the Bible and mythology. In a galloping triptych of ancient and apocalyptic visions, these vigorous poems probe the recurring image of the horse and its sometimes troubled, sometimes loving relationship with its rider.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #699500 in Books
• Published on: 2010-03-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Hardcover
• 88 pages

Features

• ISBN13: 9780896727021
• Condition: New
• Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed

From Booklist
This first book is a showstopper. Range, who has studied theology as well as literature, takes on nothing less than the interconnection of war and religion in a powerful, passionate collection. Her language is dense and allusive, her craft precise and demanding. Although her references range from classical Greek myth to European fairy tales to the Bible, her verse is grounded in the beautiful, rich land of Appalachia, first stolen from its Indian owners and now being literally dismantled through mountaintop-removal mining. In a stunning poem about the Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe, who prophesied ruin for his people and his land, she mourns that “The words of treaties melt, snowballs in the sun. / I’m a child of this dark and bloody ground. . . . I too wear the scars of Tennessee / like the flat-topped mountains where trees once grew. / Like you, I’d kill to keep it and, like you, I do.” At once learned and earthy, Range is an oracular poet of great promise. --Patricia Monaghan

Review
''Melissa Range is a wordsmith, . . . unabashedly interested in the sound, force, and color of language. Her influences are many, from Gerard Manley Hopkins to Emily Dickinson to George Herbert. Her sources, too, are beautifully various--myth, the Bible, Old English riddles, a beloved Tennessee rural landscape--in all of which she finds 'that soaring force that finds its power in adoring.' . . . Reading Horse and Rider is a thrilling experience.'' --Elizabeth Spires

''It's been a long time--too long--since we heard a music like Melissa Range's in our poetry. The alliterative play of her splendid voice and her joy in metaphorical naming would be as recognizable to the author of Beowulf as to Gerard Manley Hopkins. Like Hopkins and young W. H. Auden, she has rediscovered and revived the Anglo Saxon blood and bone of English. And like them, I believe, Melissa Range is going to have a lasting impact.'' --Mark Jarman

''Every so often, one is reminded why poetry matters, how poetry makes matter, how it provides to our experience such substantial and necessary weight with so light a thing as breath. That is to say, every so often, one comes upon a new voice, the demeanor and scope of which obliges even the weary and the jaded among us to recall and to recover the exhilaration that accompanies accomplishment. Say these poems aloud, and witness a joy that fills the mouth, delights the heart, and nudges the imagination to respond in kind. This is the best collection I've read in many years.'' --Scott Cairns

About the Author
Melissa Range was born and raised in East Tennessee. She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers' Award, a ''Discovery''/The Nation prize, and a writing fellowship from the Fine Arts Work Center in Provincetown, Massachusetts. Her poems have appeared in the Hudson Review, Image, the Paris Review, and other journals. Currently she is pursuing a Ph.D. at the University of Missouri-Columbia, where she is a David R. Francis Fellow.

Customer Reviews

exceptional
One of the finest collections I've read in a long time. The evocative and haunting "High Lonesome" is worth the price of the book alone. Fresh language. Range delights in words and we benefit.