Christina Thatcher on her new poetry collection Breaking a Mare

Imogen Davies

In her most recent collection of poetry, Christina Thatcher captures a series of vivid snapshots of life on a farm, in tune to the needs of animals and the natural world but not entirely free from the pressures of modern life.

From the very first poem, she guides you step by step into the barn, down the stalls to the horses, as if to encourage you to gently place your hand on the horse’s mane.

Her poetry cuts into precise detail of farm life and responsibilities, depicting the beauty as well as the harsh realities of nature. She explores themes of family, abuse, and the pressures of femininity while innovatively challenging traditional poetic forms.

I was fortunate enough to catch up with Christina to ask her a few questions about her collection….

What inspired you to write this collection?

As is often the way, this collection began in a very different place to where it ended. I started writing these poems just after my thirtieth birthday. In that new decade, I was obsessed with two questions: What does it mean to be a wife? What would it mean to be a mother?

These questions—along with the lessons I’d internalised from my own mother about these domestic roles—made their way into the early poems. But, always, when I think of my mother, I think of horses. And when I think of horses, I think of how we break them. And then the rest of the collection unravelled from there.

It’s clear you have an intimate knowledge of horses, perfectly capturing the nature of their movements and character. Is this due to spending a lot of time observing horses or caring for them?

Yes, a lot of time. I grew up on a farm with more than a dozen horses. I was always mucking, watering, feeding, pasturing, brushing, braiding, tacking, riding, etc. When you are kept busy caring for animals in this way you get to know them quite well.

A few particular ponies and horses feature in this collection: Dusty (my mother’s childhood pony), Mama Bear/Mare (my Dad’s favourite) and Chance (the first horse I called my own—though I don’t think we can ever really ‘own’ a horse). Others like Blackjack and Travis and Sly and Cody are not named in the book but exist between the lines. ‘

When I think about horses now, this little herd appears in my mind, still, with so much clarity.’

‘Sweeping Sonnet’ innovatively reimagines the sonnet form. Is experimentation and challenging traditional poetic forms something you hope to achieve in your poetry? If so, why?

I have always been interested in poetic constraint and the ways in which constraint can be generative. As a result, I roped quite a few forms into this collection—not just the sonnet but the pantoum and the ghazal and the duplex.

Throughout writing this book, I was occupied with the ways in which women and horses are broken—literally and figuratively—and it felt important, therefore, to consider how the poetic forms I employed to explore these ideas might be ‘broken’ too.

Your descriptions of animals and the natural world are as vivid and precise as a still life painting. What is your writing process? Do you write out in nature, in the barn, or in isolation at your desk allowing your descriptions to surface from memory?

The relationship between process and place is an interesting one. The short answer is that I write everywhere because writing, for me, begins with notes. I am a notetaker by nature. Although I adore notebooks, my handwriting has become increasingly smaller and unreadable over the years, so I’ve shifted to taking notes on my phone. Right now, I have 1,086 of these notes waiting for me.

Once I make a note—inspired by a thought, conversation, object, etc—I wait. Owen Sheers once talked about this as ‘hot-housing’; my husband calls it ‘mulching’. I’m not sure I’ve settled on a metaphor just yet but, in practice, I wait until a poem begins to make itself visible. To aid this, I come to the desk—usually on a Sunday from 10am-12pm—and see what surfaces. If nothing arrives, then I use that time to read or research or edit.

Writing is one of the few slow things in my life and I take great pleasure in that slowness.

As five of the final poems depict the American spectacle of the Rodeo, how significant was your upbringing in America in writing this collection?

My grandparents took me to rodeos often as a kid and I loved the excitement and danger of them, as well as the costumes and choreography. My grandmother rode broncs when she was younger too which made being a cowgirl seem like a real possibility.

I am not sure I could have ever written this collection if I hadn’t been raised in America on a farm, in a barn, at the side of a rodeo arena. This upbringing—and being a girl in those spaces—are at the heart of many poems in this book.

What do you hope readers will take away from this collection?

I think all I can ever hope for, really, is that whoever reads these poems takes something away. What they take is up to them.

Christina Thatcher grew up between a farm and a ranch house in Bucks County, Pennsylvania. She won a Marshall Scholarship to undertake two MAs in the UK, after which she completed a PhD in Creative and Critical Writing at Cardiff University, where she is now a lecturer. Her poetry and short stories have been widely published in literary magazines, including Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, Magma, Poetry Wales, The North, The Poetry Review and more. She has two previous poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were (2017) and How to Carry Fire (2020). Christina has toured internationally, reading her work in the UK, USA, Canada, Costa Rica, Switzerland and Romania. She lives with her gardener husband, Rich, and their violent cat, Miso.

Imogen Davies is a 24-year-old Welsh writer and creative from Aberystwyth. With a bilingual upbringing in Welsh and English, she went on to study an undergraduate degree in French, Spanish, and Catalan at Durham University while currently undertaking a Masters in Modernist Literature at the University of Edinburgh. Her first self-published collection, DISTANCES (2024), explores modern relationships, the natural world and her Welsh identity, as discussed on BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio Cymru. Named as one of sixty New Welsh Poets by Poetry Wales, her work has appeared both online and in print in various literary magazines, such as New Welsh Review and Acumen Young Poets, among others. Find out more about Imogen here.