‘When The Horses’: A Study in the Nomenclature of Normalcy https://ift.tt/meOl19X
Mary Helen Callier’s debut, When the Horses, reminds one of Jane Kenyon’s reflection on a poet’s role: “The poet’s job is to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, in such a beautiful way that people cannot live without it; to put into words those feelings we all have that are so deep, so important and yet so difficult to name. The poet’s job is to find a name for everything; to be a fearless finder of the names of things; to be an advocate for the beauty of language.” Callier reveals the deepest truths in her own beautiful way. Poems in When The Horses speak of rare emotions with honest simplicity. Their ability to corral onto the page the internal states of a body that feels deeply is as crafty as it is beautiful.
Callier’s poems are not merely acts of expression but of revelation There is an economy in her lines, a compression of image and feeling that allows each poem to hold contradictions: tenderness and brutality, silence and speech, transformation and loss.
Callier’s ability to compress image and feeling allows her poetry to name pain, longing, and the quiet violences of being alive with an exacting simplicity. Yet, to name is not simply to categorize but to summon, to allow something to be fully seen. Her work acknowledges the difficulty of such a task, the way language often falters before experience, and yet it insists on trying. In “How Everything You Touch Makes a Spark” Callier writes, “When the boys come back she’s asleep / by the tree and the box is a pile of ashes. Even when they leave the field / they stay somehow inside it, and this goes on for a very long time”
The lines are almost a reminder that the poet must make real the subtle sensation of continued violation that hurt leaves in its wake. Trauma is clothed by Callier in the nomenclature of normalcy where bodies behave as they must in the outside world, and yet on the inside the deluge of pain continues to mark its behavior with invisible ink: “the arrow is still moving when she walks / across the yard to reach it, back and forth as if to widen / the single hole it’s made.”
But naming is not just an intellectual act — it is inscribed onto the body, which becomes an archive of desire, suffering, and history itself. Callier understands the way past selves exist in the present as echoes, flickers of sensation. The poet’s desire, her “looking for ways to be taken apart” is reconfigured as the body moves back and forth in time. In ‘Two Girls Outside Herculaneum’ the desire for rupture becomes a desire for redemption through annihilation: ‘The ash, the ash. / Doesn’t she love it? Covering everything / and unable to last.’
The poems’ arrangement in the seven parts reflects a movement from wanting to expand incessantly in body and spirit, to wanting the solace in becoming nothing. In both cases, the body becomes a metaphysical register, feeling and unfeeling, loving and scarring, being and becoming. But if her poetry is a record for the body, it is not a passive one; it actively interrogates, unearths, and reconfigures the body’s transformations. Nowhere is this interrogation of transformation more evident than in “Pluto in the 8th.” The only poem in part IV, “Pluto in the 8th” crystallizes the tensions between desire, power, and mortality. The scene opens to “the girl” accompanying the men in her life who are out to hunt deer: “Already she is caught / in the immortal pull of constants: life death dreams sex”
The title, “Pluto in the 8th” points to the astrological understanding that the 8th house in one’s birth chart brings foundational shifts, ones which feel integral and brutal at the same time. Pluto, the god of the underworld, is often seen in Western astrology as the natural ruler of this house of intense change. And so this poem becomes a poem marking the girl’s coming of age or transformation. The incident described seems central to her personhood: it is shown by the way she feels accepted and welcome to join the hunt, something “she’s not asked for” and yet it is this “unknown” experience of being in the man’s world, this “other side”, which makes her feel like she “has found/ God’s secrets.”
Once the deer is killed, the girl is asked to reckon with what’s left, as the father places her hand against the body of the dying creature, reminding her that “Necessity, power” is just the other side of the same coin, thereby re-establishing the movement from desire to death, bringing them into a relationship: “void blank constant love oblivion.”
The poems inhabit spaces of tension. The body, landscape, and time all become sites of reckoning where language strains to contain what is, by nature, uncontainable. Yet, Callier’s reckoning extends beyond the human body. Her imagery is striking in its precision, often tethered to the natural world but never ornamental. Animals, landscapes, and elements appear not as mere symbols but as vital presences, imbued with agency and meaning. In “Starfish,” she writes, “The sea does not care for its dead, it only carries them further out,” a line that starkly confronts the indifference of the natural world and the ephemeral nature of all life. Through this perspective Callier redefines the romantic by sharpening the reality of existence, where beauty and brutality are never far apart. The horses of her title are not just creatures but omens, thresholds between the known and the ineffable.
Even as Callier’s poetry acknowledges nature’s indifference, it does not abandon the possibility of solace. Instead, it offers consolation through the shared act of witnessing. Her work understands that grief and loss are inevitable, that language itself is insufficient against time, and yet, in the naming, in the fearless articulation of these truths, there is a kind of salvation. In “In Hamilton, Georgia I Think About Philomela,” she writes, “When the horses in the field dissolve, they emit a terrible light,” a moment that speaks to the transformative power of loss and memory. She extends a hand to the reader, saying, I’ve been there too. This is poetry not as escape but as recognition.
In When The Horses, Mary Helen Callier has written a collection that lingers — one that refuses to look away from either the surfaces that are inscrutable and crude, or the depths that are nameless. Hers is a voice that does not just describe but transforms, reminding us why poetry matters. Poetry names what we struggle to hold, and in that naming, makes it bearable.
POETRY When The Horses
By Mary Helen Callier
Alice James Books
Published April 15, 2025
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