Trying to Catch the Horses

Dan Gerber’s Trying to Catch the Horses is his first full-length collection since his highly acclaimed selected poems, A Last Bridge Home, published in 1992.

Many of these fifty-eight poems have appeared in the finest literary magazines and anthologies. Long recognized as a meditative poet with an almost mystical connection to animals and the natural world, Gerber begins this collection with a quote from Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh: Contemplate seeing your bodily form present before you - in the trees, the grass and leaves, the river .

In the manner of Rilke and Juan Ramon Jimenez, Gerber’s unadorned poems are acts of discovery, inviting us into a place deep within ourselves through a conversation between human consciousness and the consciousness of things. In the title poem Trying to Catch the Horses , the poet achieves his apparent goal not through will or ambition, but by letting go, to become a clump of grass they (the horses) must graze , and to reach up and touch the sky itself as far as it goes . In two of the book’s most riveting poems, Gerber focuses his imagination on both our century’s World Wars, envisioning a burst of shrapnel as a flight of blackbirds, and questions the entire enterprise of a great battle in the Pacific and how we never thought / of fish in the sea and how / this was their home though not their war… .

Whether Gerber writes about horses or war, hiking a canyon or encountering a wolf, his backdrop is a profound silence against which these poems become necessary song.