In this collection, I am a Horse, Kate Newmann relentlessly seeks to retrieve the significance of the triumphs, the sorrows, the hurts, the raptures, in her own and other lives. She has a natural and dogged affinity with mortals and this gives undeniable weight to the words, whether they be considerations of Modigliani; Stella Cartwright, the woman who loved George Mackay Brown; Messiaen; Michelangelo; Lord Franklin; Tom Crean; Nijinsky; Oscar Wilde, or about the death of her godmother, to whom the book is dedicated.
Leaving in Reesie’s flat the clumsy harmonies
we struggled to sustain; the stilted, half-filled pages
of our conversations. Sensing her plans
composing themselves in her head –
to score out time; to modulate the scales of being;
pace out the breath; resolve finally
that counterpoint of self-love and self-hate, the notes
replicating, sounding their own finality.
Because she has such searing clarity; because she is a seer into this confusion of love and hate which we call living and dying, these poems are infinitely human.