Swimming with Horses - by Nicholas Hogg (Paperback)

About the Book

Swimming with Horses gathers poems of travel, witness, and working-class memory across a wide reach, moving from a Pembroke College room once occupied by Ted Hughes to the radioactive deep-time of a nuclear waste repository.

Book Synopsis

Swimming with Horses by Nicholas Hogg gathers poems of travel, witness, and working-class memory across a wide geographical and historical reach, moving from a Pembroke College room once occupied by Ted Hughes to the radioactive deep-time of a nuclear waste repository. Hogg's poetry is preoccupied with reading and writing as acts of preservation against war, extinction, and erasure, returning often to its literary inheritances in Burnside, Drake, Orton, Dickens, and de Beauvoir. Swimming with Horses is reportorial and cinematic, cool and unshowy, attentive to detail and to the texture of voice.

Review Quotes

Swimming with Horses is an outstanding second collection, driven by an acute sense of moral and imaginative urgency. Moving with fluency and intimate precision through themes of labour and love, the body's power and its fragility, technology and extinction, Nicholas Hogg writes with exquisite clarity and pared-back emotional force. This book demonstrates him to be a writer of exceptional range, skill and authority.

- Vanessa Lampert

Swimming with Horses is a candid exploration of life in the shadow of impending cataclysm, whether for the world ("our sweet blue globe / in ruin") or the means through which we interpret it, a post-literate future. Yet the itinerant, Denis Johnson-esque speakers - getting by on "the ugliest toil on minimum wage" - see human redemption in one particular, much-maligned force, on display here in vivid, captivating panoply: "I do believe in poetry."

- Robert Selby

The poems in Nicholas Hogg's Swimming with Horses are unadorned and perceptive, graceful and hungry. In Hogg, we find a poet struggling to believe in the power of the written word to transform and sustain. And yet the speaker of these poems is restless, yearning, fastening himself to the world "like a reader might / cling to a page in hope." He takes us into strange and vivid scenes-a robot scanning the lines of a book with its metal finger, an astronaut placing a family portrait in the brilliant dust of the moon-that will linger long after you put this book down. These are poems undaunted by our degraded age, poems that light up the dark.

- Edgar Kunz