The Hoofs of Pegasus

In these pages, Letitia Stockett achieves what few poets attempt: the literal dissolution of the self into something vast and unknowable. The opening sequence moves through water like a baptism, a drowning, a return to origin. 'I left my dusty self upon the sand / Like an old garment' - this is not metaphor but total surrender, the body become tidal, the mind sinking 'deep, deep / Through the green depths / Into the sea of sleep.' Stockett writes at the threshold where mythology meets flesh, where the hoofs of Pegasus strike mortal ground and take flight in the same breath. Her language is translucent, cool, and deep, carrying the reader through natural landscapes that function as spiritual anatomy. The collection moves between intimate personal musings and ancient myth, finding in the gap between them a kind of holy instability. This is poetry for anyone who has ever wanted to stop being themselves and become something else entirely. It endures because it offers what few collections dare: not redemption, but dissolution - and in that dissolution, an unexpected wholeness.