Beneath a Portrait of a Horse (Paperback)

The masterful poems of this gentle and fierce collection carry us upward, with the flash of white wing against a dark hill, but also downward with rain, through / shale and schist / to the deep running / aquifer where roots / of birches stretch / to drink, then, above us / unfurl tight buds. Again and again, Hardy discovers her own incarnation of what Gerard Manley Hopkins calls the dearest freshness deep down things and delivers it wrapped in sparkling language, in which cold is sharp as ginger and a horse leans over a fence, stretching her lips towards fireweed. -- Angela BallThrough the title poem's scrap of moon tumbling across the grass, waiting for any gate to open, readers encounter poems of a mare's heart and keen instinct well out of the starting gate. From expectation and celebration to love and loss, Hardy's first full collection embraces the artful details of lived experience, the hurt that keeps us] whole. -- Jerah Chadwick.