When The Horses – Mary Helen Callier

[Alice James Books; 2025]

As I sat reading Mary Helen Callier’s debut on the sofa, my partner, seeing the title, was amused and maybe a little frustrated. When the horses what? he said. These kinds of titles are common for poetry collections, a nice way of rebutting expectations that collections should be “about” something. In fact, I love poetry collections with titles that withhold, that urge their reader to fill in the blank. Diane Khoi Nguyen’s Ghost Of, Evie Shockley’s suddenly we, Monica Youn’s From, From or, perhaps most overtly, Fady Joudah’s […]. These titles’ incompleteness, however explicit, serve as an invitation to a collection’s self-proclaimed missingness…

All poems are engaged with missingness in some way. This is why Elisa Gabbert writes that “any text that’s alluringly cryptic or elusive—a road sign, assembly instructions—is described as poetic.” Poetry, “by forcing more white space on the page, is constantly reminding you of what’s not there,” she writes. In When the Horses, however, “missingness” is not only a formal quality of the collection, but also a recurring subject of the poems. Take the first stanza from “History”:

My father drives me to an empty field

and says this

is your history: “This

Taken alone, this sparse stanza is loud in its emptiness; the nondescript father and the placeless field combined with the epistrophic “this,” which seems to elbow an otherwise unremarkable demonstrative adjective into a priority position. The line break gapes, history becoming a vacant lacuna. The poem continues:

is the tree where the horse buckled hard,

where we kept the pigs in winter,

where the men passed out drunk

on the pavement and slept.”

I am tired of memory. Yet

here I am.

The direct quotation of the father marks offset the brazen universalism of the poem’s title, which is something I think the poem-at-large is suspicious of. The quotes, verbatim, claw something definite into the expanse of this “history,” but the rest of the poem continues to swallow specificity, as seen through a certain reluctance towards specific imagery. We meet a house that is notable only in its insistent whiteness: “painted white / by hand painted white and white and.” The father continues recounting these personal histories until the speaker, fatigued, confesses, “for years I hoped / to bypass history, live / on its teetering edge.” Callier persistently dramatizes this “teetering edge,” with poems that reckon with memory’s precarious relation to empirical reality. “History” ends, somewhat inevitably, with silence, the last word swallowed by the speechless mouth of the old house: “The door of the house hung loose / like a mouth that, now opened, / can’t speak.”

The first poem in a debut collection can be understood as veiled instructions, a hint at how the rest of the poems want to be read; the “debutante ball” of a poet’s career, as Carl Phillips put it. Callier’s first poem opens: “we walked to where we thought it might be best to see the water.” Note the modal “might”—in this poem concerned foremost with seeking, there is no guaranteed view. Before long, our attention is drawn to the dirt underfoot:

We walked to where I found what I found buried

in the dirt, beneath a patch of reeds:

the rounded head of what must have once lived

tucked inside the earth. And, like those fish

that live in caves, I saw it had no holes for eyes,

because of course it didn’t need them.

Surely, it had been a thing that lived

by touch alone. And because it was small

I took it. Because it fit inside my pocket

I carried it, feeling, as we walked in the dark

the knobs where the eyes would’ve been,

feeling, as we made our way around the rim.

And so the collection opens with a primordial sense of unseeing. The presentation of a physical, tactile object—a kind of talisman—with no “need” for eyes. A thing obdurate enough to withstand great lengths of time, but not without being marked by it. A comforting anchor, then, for something as ephemeral as a collection of poems. In this poem, “feeling” takes precedence over seeing, the word repeated twice in the fourth stanza. It is a “thing” able to “live by touch alone.” Callier prescribes a certain way of seeing, one that is somatic and guided by intuition. The poet does not need to know, with any degree of certainty, what this “thing” is:

And so I took what I found and set it on a ledge

where every day I knew the sun would bleach it.

And every day I went to see

what the light had done. I can’t say for sure

just what it was: a skull, a hole, a rounded pearl, a tiny orb

inside of which small winds had once been turning.

but every night I could feel it

moving farther from the earth

Light seems to both reveal and disfigure this thing. Despite the speaker’s tentative voice “I can’t say for sure,” she reveals a sub-verbal relationship to “what I found.” Like “History,” this poem probes the membrane between past and present, only here there is something tactile to facilitate this, something that must be “taken.” This poem is less resistant to mystery, rather than “bypassing” history altogether, here, there’s an intimacy in unknowing.

The collection contains several ekphrastic poems. The end notes reveal references to Titian, Frida Kahlo, Méret Oppenheim, Edvard Munch and Paolo Uccello (a fragment of one of his paintings takes the cover of the collection). “The Flying Bed” is a meditation on illness, immobility and grief and opens with a description of Frida Kahlo’s painting “Henry Ford Hospital”: “In the painting she is naked on the bed: parts / of her are floating, connected / by red string.” The poem is concerned with the painting’s own presentation of dissection, with parts of the body dismantled and arranged around the self. But Callier knows that by penetrating the painting she is dissecting it further, creating a third place in which the reader and the poem meet, away from the painting itself.

In “Three Black Pears” she points us at another painting: “my mother rarely talked about the painting in the kitchen. / A man had painted it for her and she had hung it / where she could always see it.” The painting reveals and conceals, the way in which it was procured is more intriguing than the work itself. Whereas “Henry Ford Hospital” describes its counterpart in some detail, delving into the consciousness of Kahlo, here, the painting is glossed over: “the small blue bowl, / the yellow grapes, / the black outlines of pears.” The second stanza swerves from the first, presenting a clandestine, nocturnal encounter between the speaker and a boy “I used to say I loved / who kept a shotgun in his closet. A farmhouse / deep in Illinois, the fields we’d walk into at night / no light, no one to hear us.” She ties the first and second stanza together with the third, burrowing a line from Elizabeth Bishop: “The self some glinting tin or armor, / a painting in an unkempt room, / quiet, visited, reeking with meaning.”

The collection’s fragment title appears in the poem “In Hamilton, Georgia, I think about Philomela,” in which the speaker drives through a distinctly southern landscape, thick with kudzu, past “horses with their necks crossed.” A soft, dreamlike fatigue infiltrates the poem: “It’s that resting I want now, not so much reaching towards.” The poem then twists around an attempt at speech, a miscommunication before closing around the lines: “the green then / swallowed everything. Two people / who can’t speak. When the horses / in the field dissolve, they emit a terrible light.” The collection’s title is suddenly reframed, contextualised by a word that seems antithetical to the horses on the cover: dissolution. I’m reminded of the light burning the object in the opening poem. Here, the titular image is not completed, rather, it withdraws in order to be seen.

This is a collection whose poems are adept at diverting the reader’s view. Callier gives an image then takes it away, excavates ways of seeing in a way both fraught with tension and searingly intimate. In this collection, light is less revealing than it is blinding, distortive and receding.

Imogen Osborne is a writer living in Ithaca, NY. She recently earned an MFA in poetry from Cornell University, where she teaches creative and expository writing.