The Black Horse and Other Stories

The people in these stories do not speak very much, and what they often say has to carry the weight of everything that is unspoken. We meet a farmer from Burnt Valley - his navy blue suit stretched tightly over his bent shoulders, a woman huddled under am oilskin trying to coax the fire to burn, a child jumping backwards and forwards over the ditch and singing. These people plant gardens, chop wood, make jam - everyday tasks that go on through grief and pleasure, childhood and old-age, making a framework for endurance. They are ‘Ordinary people. I like writing about ordinary working people’. The stories of Ruth Dallas echo the precisely observed landscape of her poems; a New Zealand of small towns and struggling farms where sheets of water cover the low-lying paddocks, and macrocarpas share the rusted roofs of old wooden farmhouses. While the landscape is particular, the stories are universal. Like the best writers in this tradition, Dallas makes the connection by drawing us into a world that we instantly recognise and are unable to forget.