Moments Before Burning

Benjamin Paul considers Mary Helen Callier’s debut poetry collection, “When the Horses.”

By Benjamin PaulMay 23, 2025

• Poetry

“WE WERE LEARNING to love // the middle part best.” When the Horses (2025), Mary Helen Callier’s debut collection, is an education in this odd kind of love, a book about the paradoxical blend of narrative and detachment it takes to see anything as the middle part. Callier focuses her attention on frozen images that gain a strange, mythic weight as they expand beyond the more knowable events that once defined them: to love the middle part is also to be free of the story that it encapsulates.

The speaker of these lines (in “The Procession”) is describing a relationship that has grown beyond the familiar narrative beats and become strangely unmoored from the passing of time:

Love or whatever

love became was scrawling its hand in the tall
grass beside us, and the dusty spot in the back

where we kept the books sealed with living,
sealed with what we meant to do but never did

would never stop expanding, growing
hard and luminous because of all the damage.

This hard luminosity lies at the heart of When the Horses—the freight of meaning that comes to rest on objects and places, on memories and past selves as they recede from view. Through art and dream, amid the lakes and hayfields of her Georgia childhood, Callier develops a private mythology for the dusty, expansive corridors of the self.

“Surely there was still some / secret in the world,” hopes the speaker of the collection’s first poem, “To Have Caused the Quake, to Have Torn It Open.” The title is drawn from a biblical lament to a violent God, and it establishes Callier’s reparative impulse toward what has been broken. Its speaker finds a fossil in the sands—a strange, subterranean creature, “inside of which small winds had once been turning”—and pockets it, setting it on a ledge to bleach in the sun. She visits it daily, but at night she has the certainty of feeling it “moving farther from the earth.” Such is Callier’s stance toward the secret of the world. We might gather up talismans and imbue them with a meaning we can hardly bear not to invest, but the mystery drifts away from these objects, as inevitably as a photograph turns a lived moment into a bleached fossil.

When the Horses applies this principle to memory: What does it mean to tell and retell a story, or turn it over repeatedly in dreams? How have these images been selected for us, and how do they change as we hold on to them? “The strangest moments matter,” begins “What She Told Me,” a poem that turns a family’s well-worn tales into fragmentary impressions: “The house was green, the child screamed. / There was wood still in the fire. / All was quiet, inbetween.” In peering into this “inbetween,” the speaker finds herself entranced by a strange double:

And the girl who lived on the hill.
She walked out the back door and swam
in the night through a lake. There was something
strange about her. She stood on the bank
and looked back at the house. She said:
Once I was a girl. I swam to the bank and looked
at the house, then I swam to the house
and looked at the bank. Pale lights, sweet air.
My eyes were two, and shone like pure obsidian,
which was what she’d take with her as proof. 

Like the moments they describe, Callier’s poems shimmer with a sense of meaning that tends to remain elusive. Their sparse beauty recalls at times the melancholy landscapes of Louise Glück’s The House on Marshland (1975), at others the soliloquies of the soul in Virginia Woolf’s The Waves (1931). The past becomes an accumulation of images and emotions, tended by that person—not quite the familiar self—who holds on to them as proof. It is this inner unknowability that fascinates Callier: “There are places even the heart cannot get to. / They vibrate with the loneliness / of objects trapped inside museums.”

When the Horses turns frequently to visual art for its luminous details. Callier understands that art and memory share a tendency to charge gestures, landscapes, certain slants of light, with unbearable weight. Frozen in time, the artwork is the middle part eternalized. This, at least, is Keats’s claim as he consoles the young lover on the Grecian urn who can neither end his song nor kiss his beloved, yet need not mourn: “For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!” Like Anahid Nersessian, who reinterprets Keats’s famous ode as the moment before a rape, Callier is aware that the images that stick are most often the painful ones. In her collection’s ekphrastic poems, she tunnels into moments of violence and asks what it would mean to inhabit them outside of their narrative context.

One such poem, “Offering,” considers Titian’s depiction of Apollo torturing Marsyas, the satyr who was flayed alive for daring to challenge the god to a contest of musical skill. Callier is drawn to the myth for its horror, but she lingers on the moment of contact in Titian’s painting, sounding quite like Keats: “Apollo will always be kneeling / like that with his hand touching Marsyas’s chest. / Tenderly, he touches it, the way one might touch a lover / they no longer want to stir from sleeping.” Has Apollo been estranged from the violence of his act, or does this seed of tenderness lie within his brutality? Ultimately, Callier is not interested in finding inner truth in an image; she is interested in how what she finds there exceeds the bounds of the self that imagines it.

The collection’s title is taken from “In Hamilton, Georgia I Think About Philomela,” a poem Callier freezes into a tableau as laden as Titian’s attempt to “turn abysmal pain / to beauty.” Driving along kudzu-blanketed fields in summer, the speaker and a companion “talk all day and never say / exactly what [they] mean.” The speaker’s attention is grabbed by the sight of two horses huddling together. “It’s that resting I want now,” she thinks, “not so much reaching towards.” But the image begins to vibrate with the August heat, with the Ovidian myth of rape and disfigurement that Callier insinuates into the poem, with the unspoken weight between these two people and what they manage to say. “B called again. And D is back in jail. / I can’t understand a word she says. He must’ve / cut her tongue off, is what I think you said.” Thrown into the unrestful middle, we know no more of these characters than Keats knows of the figures that populate the urn. Yet unlike that pastoral scene, this moment stirs:

Twice, the horse had raised its tail to flick
a fly away. Twice, I tried to say something
but all I said was “shit.” The green then
swallowed everything. Two people
who can’t speak. When the horses
in the field dissolve, they emit a terrible light.

When exactly will the horses dissolve in light? If we have learned anything from Callier’s poems, it is that these unquiet images persist in memory, lonely artifacts in the museum of the mind. Coming at the midway point in the collection, “In Hamilton, Georgia” brings the poet’s interests in myth and memory, pain and painterly detail, into alignment.

Across seven carefully paced sections, When the Horses flits between heaviness and lightness, lingering only to gather an excruciating charge: “the quiet glow a field possesses / moments before being burned.” Callier’s blend of mythic and intimate fragments reminds me of the Greek poet George Seferis, a master of the technique. There is a moment in one of Seferis’s poems that I have held on to for years as a sort of talisman. In “Mr. Stratis Thalassinos Describes a Man” (1940), the poet listens to an old man recount the story of his life. The man’s narration ends in a painful epiphany (translated by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard):

I’ve come to an end: if only someone else could begin at the point where I’ve ended. There are times when I have the impression that I’ve reached the limit, that everything’s in its place, ready to sing together in harmony. The machine on the point of starting. I can even imagine it in motion, alive, like something unsuspectedly new. But there’s still something: an infinitesimal obstacle, a grain of sand, shrinking and shrinking yet unable to disappear completely. […] I have an unbearable feeling that all the rest of my life won’t be sufficient to dissolve this drop within my soul. And I’m haunted by the thought that, if they were to burn me alive, this obstinate moment would be the last to surrender.

I often feel that poetry is the attempt to collectively pass on and erode that stubborn grain in the soul. Rarely have I encountered a book as dedicated to that task as When the Horses. This is a remarkable debut collection, a study of the self as “a painting in an unkept room, / quiet, visited, reeking with meaning.” Like the fossil Callier finds in the sands, the mystery of these poems recedes even as it fascinates. Hers is a poetry of mystical attention, trained so evenly on beauty and pain that the two begin to spill into each other.