How Fast is the Wind?
AN ANTHOLOGY OF HORSE POEMS
Candida Baker and Robbie Coburn (editors)
Publication date
ISBN:
August
2026
978-1-923248-28-1
About the author
The book is the idea of its editors CANDIDA BAKER and ROBBIE COBURN. Candy, a novelist, poet and journalist and the editor of The Penguin Book of the Horse, is also a horse woman of great accomplishment. Robbie, the poet, a horse lover and recently the author of the beautiful YA verse novel, Foal in the Wire, where you will find the loveliest depiction of the process of human healing through care for a horse that you could hope to meet.
About the book
This book is an anthology of horse poems. “Anthology,” if we trace it back to its Greek roots, literally means a gathering of flowers. And the poems in this book are a selection of blooms gathered from the many thousand poems about the beauty and majesty of the horse, and the special relationship between humans and horses.
The poems come from fine contemporary Australian poets and from poets around the world; many of the poems are new, but many will be known to readers. A most beautiful book of poems about that most beautiful of all beings and that most beautiful of all ways of being with the world.
Lovingly curated, How fast is the Wind? is a celebration of horses and their ancient kinship with us. All they’ve taught us. A book for everyone who ever loved a horse—beautiful poems by Matsuo Basho, Judith Beveridge, Judith Nangala Crispin, Carol Ann Duffy, James Galvin, Joy Harjo, Ted Hughes, Jill Jones, Anthony Lawrence, Les Murray, Rumi, Todd Turner, James Wright, and many more.
How right it seems, when so many things are wrong in the world, that we should have a book to remind us that truth and beauty are a horse. Every horse lover, and who could not be, will be flushed anew with affection for that magnificent creature we are lucky enough to call a friend.
—RACHEL WARD
actress
A vibrant collection dedicated to the generosity of the horse and its interweaving, over many generations, with humanity. The horse represents gentleness and fire in equal measure—a generous foil to the turbulence and uncertainty of the world, but also a vulnerable partici pant in that space.
—SIOBHAN HODGE
poet and scholar, author of Justice for Romeo