Conversations with a Prince: A Year of Riding at East Hill Farm

by HelenHusher (Author)

• Used

  Hardcover
  2005

  $4.35

  In Helen Husher's warm, often funny account of returning to riding after many years away, the gravitational pull of the horse barn finds expression in the unlikely alliance between the fifty-something author and a lesson horse named Prince. Wayward and charming, Prince reopens doors that allow Husher to explore and share the essential grammar of horses-what we do with them, what we want from them, and what we hope for when we approach them-and proves that riding is a form of interspecies poetry. Weaving together the past, the present, and classic riding texts like National Velvet and Black Beauty, Husher peels away the instructive and redemptive layers of our view of horses. The hard truths underneath can be painful, but also full of a mute, strange, and complicated beauty. Written for riders and nonriders alike, Conversations with a Prince brings to life a world of gestures, sensation, intuition, negotiation, and close observation, but the primary target is human passion. Horse craziness, says Husher, has certain magical, reiterative properties-good evidence that riding really does approach allegory. But riding also brings with it grief, love, work, and endless correction. These things are the opposite of allegory, and hold their magic because they refuse to turn into blurry abstractions. CONVERSATIONS WITH A PRINCE will not teach its readers how to ride, but to understand why riding matters by placing it into the larger context of a moral and engaged life, and a life vastly improved by having horses in it.