Organized into six sections, Eric Nelson’s Horse Not Zebra shines with musical, tonal, and imagistic nuance, replete with mesmerizing meditations on environmental and humanistic themes. I value most of all Nelson’s nature images, syntactical constructions (including appositives and parallelism), and sense of humor.

Nelson’s attention to detail is outstanding. In “Mulch,” he describes his Zen-like love for mulch:

The word itself is tasty—from old English melsc—
mellow, sweet—strawy dung, loose earth, leaves
morphing into middle English molsh—soft, moist.
Organic blend of comfort food and love making,
chocolate in bed, soft moans, life and kneel,
savory smell rising like yeast, steamy as hot bread.

He develops concrete imagery with strings of descriptions to intensify tension, expand the literal or affective landscapes of his poetic worlds, or both. In “Mulch,” he employs sensual hyperbole and multiple caesuras to describe (almost characterize) mulch, gradually repeating M-sounds and S-sounds to create a playful tone. The word mulch—not just mulch itself—is depicted as “mellow, sweet—strawy dung, loose earth, leaves / morphing into middle English molsh—soft, moist.” Sound and sense, therefore, work well off each other.

Throughout Horse Not Zebra, Nelson juxtaposes images of humans with animals, especially bears, one of the most memorable motifs in the book. He intersperses the motif cleverly, sparking personal intrigue and, on a more technical level, maintains the thematic cohesion of the book. In “Parade,” he writes about a neighborhood bear sighting:

The growing crowd follows, phones in hand,
taking stills and videos, whispering excitedly, swapping
bear stories, laughing, parents telling kids to stay
out of the way of the guy riding a bike in figure eights,
the line stopping short when the bear glances over its shoulder,
regards its followers with a blend of curiosity or disdain,
then keeps leading the parade, ignoring the dogs losing
their minds behind fences, ignoring cars driving toward it.

The excerpt above—a sensational seventy-four words long—builds with tension and humor, underscoring human wonderment and foolishness. The verbs “swapping” and “laughing,” for example, extend the sentence, adding physical and musical momentum to the combined imagery, further amplifying the sardonic bond between the unamused bear and the awestruck humans—so awestruck, in fact, that they would endanger themselves and possibly the bear just to gawk at the creature, a pseudo-celebrity.

Lastly, Nelson is more than willing to direct satirical humor at himself. In “Graying,” he, an older poet, discusses his gray hair to hilarious yet humbling effect:

A good friend—who else—said
You’ve gone gray so fast!
I leaned forward like an old silverback gorilla,
pressed my weight onto my knuckles. Grunted.

The stanza equivocates old age with an animalistic transformation, as if the older one gets, the less human one becomes, appearing as a source of ridicule, a source of shame, unlike the fragrant pile of earth in “Mulch” or the awe-inspiring bear in “Parade.” Nelson, if anything, is poking fun at his insecurity about growing old, the humor complementing his vulnerability. The last two words in the stanza imply his unease: the repeated UH-sounds (assonance) in “knuckles” and “Grunted” mimic a grunt—the grunt of “an old silverback gorilla,” yes, but more important, the grunt of a man, blessed to still be alive, coming to terms with his own mortality.

I resonate with Eric Nelson’s Horse Not Zebra, an engaging book of accessible poems. Anyone who wishes to learn how to write better poems or anyone who wishes to relax with a great book should read Horse Not Zebra.