Creating a Passion Project
The wonderful journey of curating an anthology of horse poems from around the world with a friend, fellow writer and horse lover...
How often is it that writers get the chance to indulge themselves in a passion project? The idea for this anthology grew out of a friendship based on a mutual love of literature and horses. I was chatting with poet and writer Robbie Coburn one day, when we accidentally discovered that for some time both of us had been harbouring the same idea of compiling an anthology of horse poems close to our hearts. (You can pre-order here: How Fast is the Wind? )
Sometimes, if we’re lucky, the universe aligns with our intention, and so it was with How Fast is the Wind?
The title, by the way, came long after the anthology was compiled, and of course, as often happens with books, we discovered and discarded numerous titles, but Australian poet Jill Jones evocative poem, part of her fifteenth collection, How To Emerge, (which recently won the 2026 Kenneth Slessor Prize for Poetry at the NSW Literary Awards) was perfect, we decided.
And as a personal sidenote to that – Arabian horses have always been a favourite breed for me; when I think of ‘wind’ and horses, it inevitably conjures up images of both beautiful and brave Arabians, but also beautiful and flighty Arabians; both imagined and real. In my memoir, The Heart of a Horse, I wrote about my son’s Arabian, Johnny, a true Pegasus pony, who jumped for the moon, and lived to the grand old age of 30. The cool and dark evening he was put to sleep, the air was still and quiet, but as he passed – from an injury from which there was no recovery – the south wind suddenly blew, and I saw his spirit swirl up into the after world, back to the ancient homelands of the Bedouins.
In fact, when you think about it, how could this poetry anthology be called after any element other than the wind?
And so, Robbie and I began to gather a few of our favourite horse poems. The poems, we decided, would not be restricted by time (going back as far as Matsuo Basho, for example, and forward to Joy Harjo’s She Had Some Horses), but would be what we considered to be the most arresting metaphysical, metaphorical or literal expressions of the horse; the animal which has influenced both of our lives, and our writing, since childhood. I didn’t know, when Robbie and I first met, that he had always loved the prose anthology I’d edited, The Penguin Book of the Horse, and that it lives on his bedside table, a high compliment indeed.
“I grew up surrounded by horses, and they’ve always been a focus in my poetry and writing,” Robbie told me. “I’d dreamed of putting together an anthology of horse poems, and to be a part of this ambitious passion project, is a dream come true for me. I love what the book has become over the time we’ve spent working on it.”
‘On the high prairie
are only horse and rider...’
The Cariboo Horses, Al Purdy
We were ambitious enough to want this anthology, which both of us agreed was missing from our bookshelves, to include a little more than the poems and gradually artworks, quotes and prose began to make their presence felt in the manuscript. We hope that anyone diving into this book will find these pieces a small pause between the extraordinary and diverse collection of poems we’ve gathered for you.
I’ve always loved the artist Michael Zavros's work, and over the years, having interviewed him several times, we’d also had conversations about the horses in our lives and what they meant to us. I was thrilled down to my Ariat bootstraps when Michael said he was happy for us to use some of his images throughout the book, and I think anybody reading, or even just flicking through this anthology, will be stopped dead by the force and power of his images. My niece, Rosie Sherwood (on Substack as A Nomadic Rose), also took some warm and beautiful portraits with her Hasselblad of a few of my horses when she was out in Australia last year doing research for her PhD into climate change art, and there were a few poems in the anthology that seemed to invite her images in. Over the years I’ve also acquired a fair mass of horse photographs (surprise, surprise), and many of them are photographs taken by moving the camera when horses themselves were moving. They seem to represent, or contain, what for me is perhaps the essence of ‘horse’, or even of life itself – movement and energy. (Probably not surprising that I developed an obsession with Eadweard Muybridge’s motion photography long before I started writing my latest novel, Light and Shadow.
What gradually began to emerge was a collection of writing, whether it was poems or pictures or quotations, that seemed to create on the page every horse, imagined or real, that has ever been. From mustangs and brumbies to carriage horses, to ponies, to racehorses, to dream horses – how have we loved thee? Let us count the ways, to paraphrase Shakespeare. Because after many decades spent rescuing horses from humans that have not loved them, what I have learnt from this anthology is the myriad different forms of love that exist in the world for this wondrous, sensitive, sentient equine being, who can inhabit our waking lives and our dreams, sometimes, it would often seem, to the exclusion of all else.
‘The horses huddle under lightning’s stockwhips, under tiered
clouds: a grandstand of dark akubras, mist swirling like dust...’
Horses, Turon River, Judith Beveridge
During the course of compiling this anthology, all of us involved in the making of the book have been shocked and heart-broken by the New South Wales Government’s continued use of large-scale aerial culling in Kosciuszko National Park, based on what many horse lovers believe to be inaccurate and exaggerated numbers. We’ve dedicated the book to the memory of the magnificent palomino Brumby stallion Matagi and his daughter, who were shot (not by the NPWS) near Sawyers Hill, in the safe zone of the park in June this year. Mark Tredinnick, our publisher, was moved to write All the Pretty Horses as a lament for what is happening to our wild horses, whose genes contain some of the oldest and strongest bloodlines in Australia.
Of course, the poets in this anthology all love horses, that’s a given, and many of them have owned, or own (if you can ever really own a horse), horses. There are horse-trainer poets, horses-as-metaphor poets, poets who write about the terrible pain of losing horses, sometimes under horrific circumstances, and poets who write about the sheer joy of simply being with a horse. Some write with extraordinary precision about the horse itself: its body or, in the case of Elizabeth Campbell, even more specifically, its eye. There are poets whose poems are not what they first seem, and poets whose poems are exactly what they seem. They have all come together in a tapestry of poems, horses, images and stories, and even of new friendships formed through the love of horses and the bond of creation—and I can’t really think of better beginnings for a friendship.
What Robbie and I wanted was for the anthology to be presented as a publication to cherish, and we couldn’t have hoped for a better publisher than 5Islands Press’s Mark Tredinnick, a poet and horse lover, and Steve Meyrick, a poet and poetry lover, as well as a precise and expert editor.
What both of us have found extraordinary on this journey, which if we were to name it as a horse experience, would, without doubt, be a long endurance ride, is that this book would never have come into existence if hadn’t been for the fact that we had each other. The ability for one of us to be on fire while the other was in a quiet phase, or for us to bolster each other along during the difficult – and lengthy – patch of gaining permissions from the authors, was essential to the creation, and curation, of the anthology.
‘Do you think we will be happy?
Dream horses do not need your eyes.’
How Fast is the Wind, Jill Jones
Robbie and I both grew up in the country surrounded by horses; both of us with complex, sometimes turbulent, family lives. We both witnessed the duality of life on the land – the kind, gentle and sometimes idyllic country dream, versus the stark reality of life, death and tragic injuries that have reached into both our souls at a cellular level and have informed both our lives ever since.
Horses for us, as for many – perhaps all – of the poets in this collection became an anchor point of emotional safety. There is a place we can escape to anytime we like, where horses run free in imaginary fields, and where we can ride, fly, or engage with them at a moment’s notice.
‘A horse sees a world blurred in the two-tone flourish of the photo finish.
Look into the amber planet of a horse’s eye and a refracted universe forms there.’
Seven Horse Secrets, Jane Commane
Robbie and I have both been truly overwhelmed by the response to our request to reprint poems on a shoestring budget. The generosity of the publishing houses and poets from around the world to allow us to reprint their poems and quotations has meant that we have been able to publish poets from every stage of their career – from poets starting out, to current stars of the poetry firmament, and to those who passed and have left behind their passionate expressions of love for our four-legged friend.
It is our sincere hope that this anthology will reach out to poetry and horse lovers alike. If, perhaps, it gives those who maybe one or the other, a glimpse into how these two worlds can form one piercing beautiful whole, then we will have done our job.
Part of the proceeds from this book will go towards horse rescue in Australia.
Pre-order How Fast is the Wind?
Click the link to purchase my latest novel Light and Shadow as a paperback or e-book
Click the link to purchase my memoir The Heart of a Horse