Grief and Horses - Poetry by Patrick Daly

Publication Date: November 15, 2021

Paperback, 80 pages

ISBN: 978-1-937968-95-3

$21.50 retail, 16.50 from publisher

There is grief, to be sure, in Patrick Daly’s new poetry collection, especially associated with the madness of war and its aftermath. And horses, yes, along with many other animals, all with wisdom to offer. But most of all there is language, the love of it and the skillful use of it, as in the opening poem “Words” in which he wishes to learn the language of trees, “But the words of trees / are so large we cannot hear them.” Perhaps not, but in Daly’s poetry, we nevertheless can sense that wider world. Writing in the foreword to the book, J. David Cummings observes that “Empathy is the rich center of all the poems in this book,” the “hidden alchemy” by which Daly works this wonder, such that in the end it is not grief that we take away from these poems, but hope.

Praise for Patrick Daly & Grief and Horses

Patrick Daly is a poet who watches the world while going to work in Silicon Valley. When he sees a raving street person and a circling raven, we get “Displaced Person and Raven.” But for Daly, the person is praying, not raving and, of course, the raven is preying. Two kinds of hunger and still, this is not a sad book. There is always music and a cadence of words that make us weep and celebrate at the same time. Daly writes:

The piano is spreading suspicion of delight among us as a tree / spreads shade.

I love this book. It is full of animals: owls, crows, water buffalo, egret, raccoons, Simon, the difficult dog in Jamaica and Uganda and, my favorite, “Hen with Pastry Bag.” In the poem “Chosen,” we worry with Noah about all the creatures left off the ark:

All or none and the ark this earth that holds us.

—April Eiler, author of Seven Waiters Brought The Water

The sound of an acorn banging down onto a silent sidewalk unlocks horrifying images of razor wire and checkpoints; the shadow from a flashlight conjures a rage-blind Ahab; grief becomes a horse surging across a wild river “where we did not think a path could be made”, Daly’s poems enchant and surprise as they slide from the familiar to the unexpected, “leaning into otherness” like the gull man, his wings bolted onto his bones. His deceptively conversational style is charged with grace and fire; but it is the underlying compassion and love, and delight in this world that lingers in the mind and heart, and a joy in language, as his words “carefully, like marsh waders, in silvery after-dawn light” pick their way towards us.

—William Gatti, author of Two Good Thieves (as Daniel Finn)

Patrick Daly’s new book of poems Grief and Horses is scintillating in its juxtapositions, evocations, images. The crunch of the title promises much: abstract/actual, rippling perspective, emotion and natural beings. Crows are abundant—in their blackness, soundings, and faint unknown menace. But Daly’s range is vast: from horror to lizards, God to a briefcase, horses to grief. The great power of the work is in the music of its words, of course, but far more in its almost overwhelming feeling, given shape and direction by intellectual rigor, carefully chiseled rhythms, and imperceptible, subtle structures, rigid as rebar and smooth as concrete. Every reading of every poem reveals more. Relish them!

—Jeremy Yudkin, Professor of Music, Boston University, author of From Silence to Sound

About the Author

For the past decade Patrick Daly has been working for software start-ups, writing poetry on his lunch hours. His poem “Words” was a 2015 poem of the year in the New Statesman (London). He has published poetry in many other magazines and e-zines, most recently in Portside, Ekphrasis, and The Sand Hill Review, and poems of his have appeared recently in the anthologies Extreme Sonnets, The Place that Inhabits Us, A Bird Black as the Sun, Transfer One Hundredth Edition, and America, We Call Your Name. His poem “Tiananmen Square” received honorable mention in the Pushcart Prizes, and his chapbook Playing with Fire won the Abby Niebauer Memorial Prize. He has published articles and book reviews in The Times (London), the San Jose Mercury News, the Palo Alto Weekly, and The Montserrat Review. Nicholas Kristof published a portion of his poem “The War” in his column in The New York Times. He and his wife Charlotte Muse were the founders of Out of Our Minds, a prime-time poetry show still running on KKUP radio in Cupertino, California.