Muybridge's Horse

Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for Poetry

Shortlisted for the 21st Annual Trillium Book Award for Poetry in English

Finalist for an Ottawa Book Award

Part history, part invention, Muybridge's Horse is a sensual biographical long poem that follows the career of Eadweard Muybridge, a nineteenth-century British-born photographer whose studies of bodies in motion led to the invention of moving pictures.

Whether navigating hallucinogenic American deserts, violent coastal geographies, or a feral 1850s San Francisco, Rob Winger's tale uses an inventive combination of poetic styles and voices, recounting early attempts to capture images on glass. Searching out stereoscopic beauty, Winger's version of Muybridge carries portable darkrooms from the heights of Yosemite's domes to the depths of the North and South American coastlines, and ultimately onto an 1878 race track, where a battery of fifty cameras settles a bet about a horse's stride, forever changing the world's understanding of movement.

Charged with murder, accused of neurosis,compelled to record ruins and wage-slavery, Muybridge conveys the violence implied by the photographic act and the blunt details hidden behind our histories. Elegantly told, Muybridge's Horse is an evocative exploration of history, personal obsession, passion and negatives.
Prize(s): Winner CBC Literary Awards (2003) 
"Anyone who has seen Muybridge's astonishing photography will be equally astonished by Winger's story of the man himself. It is hypnotizing."
--P.K. Page
–

"Sustained energy, focus, and a wide array of special lenses make Rob Winger's first book a serious accomplishment."
--Ken Babstock
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"This poem, Muybridge's Horse, is so finely achieved - its luminously sustained lyric, its compelling narrative, its inventiveness and virtuosity."
--Dionne Brand
–

"One of the most impressive Canadian poetic debuts in recent years ... A book to be read once through for the dramatic story of a man who ate lemons and maggoty cheese, once for the sweet phrasings and then again for the nuanced comment on the photograph as a historical document, Muybridge's Horse is a remarkable achievement."
--Sonnet L'Abbé, The Globe and Mail
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"...a very ambitious first book of poems...Muybridge's Horse is at once a biography, a portrait of an age and a depticion of the early years of photography."
--Cary Fagan, The Gazette
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"Rob Winger has captured, in beautiful vignettes, the astonishing life of Eadweard Muybridge. With lavish imagery, Winger evokes the emotional intensity of a photographic genius caught up in the birth of a new technological era."
--Governor General's Award Jury, 2007
–Governor General's Award Jury

"Muybridge's Horse has to be admired. A nearly 200-page book, Winger works through the biography of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose work in the 'studies of bodies in motion led to the invention of moving pictures.' Working a large, complex canvas, Winger builds his long poem as a kind of poetic novel as he writes through the facts and fictions of Muybridge's life - a journey from England, through America's deserts to San Francisco. It culminates at a famous 1878 racetrack where 'a battery of 50 cameras settles a bet about a horse's stride, forever changing the world's understanding of movement'".
--rob mclennan, Ottawa Xpress
–Xpress

"This is a book one should feel proud of. It's certainly one of the strongest, most daring, original and polished debuts I've seen in some time and one that should be discussed. It serves as a reminder to young poets. Don't rush. Don't rush. Let the project build beyond what you dreamed you could achieve."
--Sina Queyras
–Sina Queyras

"Muybridge's Horse is a fine piece of reading...It is a book that, in itself, demands rereading."
--Amanda Jernigan, ARC Poetry Magazine
–ARC Poetry Magazine

"Winger poeticizes with vivid and arresting results... overall, this history told through poetic fragments becomes and intriguing literary analogue of Muybridge's photographic technique."
--Aaron Giovannone, Canadian Literature
–Canadian Literature

Nightwood Editions
ISBN: 9780889712317
Paperback / softback
5.5 in x 8.5 in - 200 pp
Publication Date: 16/05/2007
BISAC Subject(s): POE011000-POETRY / Canadian / General,POE000000-POETRY / General 
Thema Subject(s): DC-Poetry