Margo Taft Stever’s previous poetry collection, The End of Horses (2022), blended the author’s heartbreaking family history, her passionate love of horses, and her sometimes harsh ruminations on the fate of the earth. If horses, for Stever, embody the raw strength of nature, their slaughter, as imagined in the apocalyptic title poem of that earlier collection, represents the end of nature.
In this new chapbook, Bareback Rider (2025), Stever’s characteristic themes gather further gravity. Pungently, even humorously, written, but veined, too, with lyrical descriptions of the imperiled environment, her poems emerge from a place haunted by sadness. Take, for example, the book’s opening poem, “No Book,” which Stever wrote in tribute to the prose poem “Book” in Gertrude Stein’s 1914 tour de force of verbal cubism, Tender Buttons.
Stein: “Book was there, it was there. Book was there . . ./it put a bank, a bank when, a bank care.”
Stever: “Only a few humans. Living in northern Canada. No books. A few humans./No banks either. No banks left. Run on banks dried the banks up.”
Here Stever plays on the double meaning of banks (banks of rivers, banks as repositories of savings) to envision desiccated nature and decimated humanity. The poem continues, “Everyone is infected, infecting others, so there is no safety, everyone is/exposed, boneward, exposed, inside and out—there is no stopping it.” Bleak as it is, the poem ends with an anthem to the role of the poet as investigator, witness, and truth-teller: “They will always gaze/as if nothing is there, while I point to it.”
As in her previous collection, Stever conjures horses as archetypal forces of nature. In “The Horse Fair, II,” this equine embodiment of raw but restricted energy struggles against the humans who would pen it up or ride it with a whip. Her language resembles a cubist painting, none more so than Picasso’s Guernica (1937), with an agonized horse at its center:
With her one-ton
body, the horse wants
to bite the hand
that pens her, crams
her into agony, contorted,
twisting, prevents her
from galloping to
higher pasture
Stever’s focused imagery also calls to mind the stop-action photography of the nineteenth-century analyst of high-speed motion Edweard Muybridge, who broke a horse’s gallop, its hooves moving too fast to be seen by the naked eye, into separately visible entities. In lines of two- or three-word lengths, she zeroes in on movement and anatomy:
Horse downward
snorting, head pulling
neck, main, tail
wrenched free
dance the hooves
dance the snorting…
In the next poem, “Horse and Rider, Falling,” Stever envisions a state of oneness between horse and rider reminiscent of Yeats’ famous question, “How can we know the dancer from the dance?” In this instance, the “I” of the poem recalls a catastrophic fall during a hunter-jumper event when the rider and her horse, hurling through space as one, crash into a fence. (“She is part horse. They are both seers of the path…they pool their senses, vision—all the time galloping, galloping.”) We don’t learn what happened to the horse, but we’re told the rider fractured her spine and neck, a painful reminder that the domestication of naked energy, in this case a show horse, can sometimes go only so far before spilling violence and injury in its wake.
If Stever is a nature poet who focuses on the ravaging of the innocent natural environment, she is also a confessional poet who speaks in clear, conversational language about the ravaging of the innocent child by the distorting pressures of the nuclear family. This abject situation is shown most devastatingly in her long poem “Family Photograph.” It’s not clear to the reader if the poet is looking at an actual photo of her family or if she’s using the concept of a single simultaneous visual representation as a hook for assembling mini-portraits of each member of her family—her sisters, her brothers, her prematurely deceased father, and her cruel, abusive, alcoholic mother. Each of her siblings seems to have been traumatized by the fragile family dynamics, where temporary alliances are formed only to be violated in the Darwinian struggle for parental guidance and love, natural resources in short supply in this tormented family.
The poet’s mother, never given a name, haunts Bareback Rider like an evil spirit. She appears in several of the poems, as she had most memorably in “Citizen’s Arrest,” a tartly Ironic prose poem in The End of Horses in which crazy Mother, married to the mayor of her small town, takes it upon herself to flag down cars that she, stewed in drink and paranoia, decides are driving too fast. “Changeling,” perhaps the most searing poem in Bareback Rider, directly addresses Mother after her death and burial. A changeling, of course, is a child who is stolen from its home, forcibly resettled, and raised in an alien environment. The implication is that Mother was once pure, natural, and good before being kidnapped by alcohol, narcissism, and manic depression. “Now you have come out of yourself,/removed your skin, my mother,/my changeling, who has known/so many selves, so many shapes.” Stever speaks from a place of love, if not also regret, when she repeats, “Now you have come from yourself,/my mother, my pupa, emerging/from the chrysalis, my changeling,/saved from the caw, the drunken froth.” The poet acknowledges the hard truth that governed her mother’s existence: “part of you yearns/for madness, and part resents/our strict refusal to allow you/to run away.” The poem ends with the poet telling her dead mother, whom she compares to a wild fox, “I want to leave the burial/to cover my face in the warmth/of your red fur, but I know you will/run. The fox has become you.”
Many of Stever’s poems, especially the confessional ones, are painfully direct, without a layer of protection between her and her darker emotions: in that regard, she rides bareback. But other, more hermetically private poems ask the reader to ride bareback as well, that is, without a firm grasp of the poem’s personal allusions. Regardless, the chapbook as a whole takes readers on an exhilarating series of jumps of the mind.
David M. Lubin, the Charlotte C. Weber Professor Emeritus of Art at Wake Forest University, is the author of eight books on American art, film, and visual culture, including, most recently, Ready for My Close-Up: The Making of “Sunset Boulevard” and the Dark Side of the Hollywood Dream.
Margo Taft Stever’s collections include The End of Horses (Broadstone Books, 2022), Cracked Piano (CavanKerry Press, 2019) Shortlisted as Finalist and Honorable Mention for 2021 Eric Hoffer Book Award; Ghost Moose Kattywompus Press, 2019; The Lunatic Ball (Kattywompus Press, 2015); The Hudson Line (Main Street Rag, 2012); Frozen Spring (Mid-List Press First Series Award, 2002); and Reading the Night Sky (Riverstone Poetry Chapbook Competition, 1996). Her poems, essays, and reviews have appeared in magazines and anthologies, including Plume, Verse Daily, “Poem-A-Day” on poets.org, Prairie Schooner, Connecticut Review, Cincinnati Review, West Branch, New England Review, and upstreet. She is founder of the Hudson Valley Writers Center and founding and current co-editor of Slapering Hol Press. As 2021 Adjunct Assistant Professor in the Bioethics Department of the School of Medicine at Case Western Reserve University, she teaches a course on poetry and bioethics. She lives in Sleepy Hollow, New York www.margotaftstever.com.