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

Husher, Helen

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1592286933 ISBN 13: 9781592286935

Publisher: Lyons Pr, 2005

Synopsis

When after many years Helen Husher returned to horseback riding, she discovered that her perceptions of the physical, mental, and spiritual aspects of the sport had in some ways changed, but in other ways had become enhanced. Horses of Instruction is an account of her first year back in the saddle, her trials and triumphs under the instructors and on the horses that inhabited the small Vermont barn that became the author’s daily destination and haven.

We get to know the people who frequent East Hill Farm: trainers with differing views on the nature of riding and horse care, and fellow boarders and students whose goals and idiosyncrasies will strike an identifiably familiar chord in every reader-rider. But most vividly and lovingly drawn are the horses themselves: Dr. Denton, the Thoroughbred “who displays his heritage by objecting to everything”; Railund, the “self-possessed and schoolmasterly” Dutch warmblood; Reba, “whose responsiveness has a moral dimension, a desire for order, certainty and knowledge”; and especially Prince, “unglamorous but agreeably transparent, playing his life for laughs.”

No detail escapes Husher’s perceptiveness. “One of the sayings in the horse world is that a clean horse is a happy horse, but in my experience this is not really true--horses like dirt, and go to considerable trouble to burrow around in as much of it as they can find. But what horses do like is to be tended, and I think this is what this old saw points to--being touched and noticed and having their parts inspected and admired puts them in a good mood.”

More than just a horse book, Horses of Instruction transcends the genre through the author’s keen eye, infectious humor, and deft style. With it, Helen Husher joins the ranks of Jane Smiley, Michael Korda, and Thomas McGuane as one of America’s finest equestrian writers.

About this title

About the Author

Helen Husher is the author of A View from Vermont and Off the Leash: Subversive Journeys Around Vermont. Her articles and stories have appeared in Vermont Life, Vermont Magazine, Seven Days, and other publications. She lives in Montpelier, Vermont.

From the Back Cover

What is it about horses?
And why do they matter?

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 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.

Reviews

"I had come back to horses after seven years away," begins Husher's meditations on horses and riding. She is sent to catch Prince for her first lesson, and discovers him caked with mud with his blanket half off and dragging on the ground. But it is this little, almost pony-sized Prince, along with Reba (who grows into her prettiness) and stately Railund, who engage the author as she relearns the art of riding. Husher meanders through contemplations about what she learned from each horse she rode (including flashbacks to her childhood mount), mixing horse psychology with human wants and desires as she ponders the essential reasons people love and need horses. Threading in the truths available from classic horse stories such as National Velvet and Black Beauty, along with the hard work of caring for horses and improving one's riding skill, Husher reveals what draws so many to the joy of horses. Nancy Bent
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Edition details

• Publisher: Lyons Pr
• Publication date: 2005
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1592286933
• ISBN 13: 9781592286935
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 200