Wild Horses, Wild Dreams: New and Selected Poems 1971-2010

Wild Horses, Wild Dreams follows a trajectory from the early seventies to the present, giving a generous overview of Lindy Hough's intellectual world and emotionally evocative language. The book samples poems from previously published books along with new poems. Selections from Changing Woman, Psyche, The Sun in Cancer, and Outlands & Inlands show a delight in language and the transformative nature of art, grounded in place and sensuous detail. The narrator of Changing Woman is a young mother in her early twenties, steeped in the detail of life, questioning and ironic as she puzzles out truth and authenticity in Maine. In Psyche, she maps the inner life of a Vermont college town and its inhabitants, in a conceit based on Helen of Troy. In The Sun in Cancer, Hough begins to show a strong involvement in Buddhism and consciousness as she explores life on the West and East coasts. In Outlands & Inlands, dreams, dance, and obsession map changing human dilemmas. In the new poems, Hough continues her account of an attempt to square external reality with inner, digging deeper into human dynamics as history folds in on contemporary concerns. Linguistic nuance, surprising syntax, and the grounding of the breath poetics of projective verse are all richly present here, and show why she has gained acclaim as an important modern poet.

Lindy Hough was cofounder of the seminal literary magazine Io, which began in 1964, and is cofounder and publisher of North Atlantic Books. She has published four books of poetry and her fiction and poems have appeared in numerous literary magazines. She coedited Nuclear Strategy and the Code of the Warrior, a collection of antinuclear literature. She recently finished a novel called Shades of Blue. She lives in Maine and northern California.

About Lindy Hough