I must confess that I opened the pages of Susan Downe’s first book of poetry, Little Horse, with some trepidation. As I read the marketing material describing this first book of poetry written by a woman in her sixties about, among other subjects, her experience of breast cancer, I envisioned sentimental, perhaps even mawkish, meditations on loss and longing.

But that is certainly not what I found. This highly polished book distills the essences of central human experiences – among them, motherhood, mortality, love, and sex – into concentrated lyrics that pulse with life. In these poems every word, every image, every line break, reverberates with vitality, even in those poems about loss itself: “Aching/for my daughter/and my sons, as if/they are little/children still, as if/my leaving if/I leave leaves them/lost.”

Though much of the book is ostensibly about mortality, the poems themselves spend more time imagining how language defines and changes us. In “O – An Essay,” Downe narrows her focus to the simple letter ‘o’ and its complex power to communicate desire, love, and loss: “she/rivers our cells with root/intentions, reaves us, loosens/the weave of us, leaves/us changed.”

If anything, these poems are too carefully pruned; at times I found myself longing for a glimpse of dead wood, or wild, untamed undergrowth beneath these picture-perfect surfaces. But given how much of the collection is concerned with the act of cutting away, of pruning, this spare, lean poetic style seems apt. Like the bodies and gardens that they describe, the poems themselves are carefully trimmed so that only the vital living words that promise to bloom remain on the page: “Come/ play me the way we/do, before I do, before/I am.”

My only real complaint about this collection is that there is not enough of it. With only 50-odd pages of tight, terse lyrics, there is surprisingly little time to get to know this new poetic voice, or to see where it might be taking us. So it is my hope that Little Horse marks the beginning of a long and prolific poetic career.