My Dark Horses

by Jodie Hollander

Set against the charms and vicissitudes of growing up in a family of musicians, Jodie Hollander's beautifully-structured and compelling debut follows the story of a daughter's maturing relationship with her mother. Interspersed with versions of Rimbaud, and always alert to the surreal comedy of the human condition, these powerful and immediate poems chart with huge passion, musicality and insight a complex journey towards familial understanding and reconciliation.

Genres: Poetry

64 pages, Paperback

Published April 11, 2017

Reviews

[Juliano · Rating 5 out of 5]

“And now, Mother, what am I to do? / And what about all these bones you left?” With My Dark Horses, Jodie Hollander plumbs the familial past, the legacy and interconnectedness of a daughter-mother relationship in particular. As Hollander starts with poems like ‘Splitting and Fucking’ and ‘The Metronome’, she is exploring the Larkin-esque “fuck you up” inevitability that underscores parent-child relationships. There is mingling of pathos and horror in poems like ‘Mother’s Wrists’ and elsewhere, as Hollander contemplates generational trauma, hate and/or resentment vs love and/or devotion. There is a recurring motif/organising principle of music/instruments/sound throughout, and versions of Rimbaud poems, and gorgeous interspersed poems about horses. After “All those years / of trying to understand / which of this is her, / which of this is me? / Getting at the truth / was always so confusing / amidst her craziness; / how to separate?”, there is a reversal of roles in ‘Skyping with my Mother’ and ‘The Last Time I Saw Her’, leading to the incendiary ‘Dream of a Burning Woman’, and onwards into profoundly moving works of grief and acceptance: “In the end she declared it had been a brutal life”, and eventually “that vague sense that things / were always on the verge of getting better.” It is the legacy of regret that’s most palpably haunting: “Could I restore you / to your original state; / or would you drag me, / just as She did, / into your dark room / of old howling sorrows?”

[Mallika · Rating 4 out of 5]

Depressing poems about a dysfunctional family. I had no clue what to expect but this was very well written!