Juanita Casey is a highly individualistic Irish yarn spinner. Her short works reflect a blend of comedy, irony, and tragedy peculiarly intense and poetic. Her stories are mythic definitions of the collective Irish spirit as well as highly metaphorical and personal dramas. Most often they are tales of animals, particularly horses, which serve not only as well-known snorting and grunting creatures but also as emissaries of a "secret ageless darkness," metaphors of an eternity that is "all horse." (Her original fictional horse, Blondie, "had begun ten thousand years before and was still here, and would go on being Horse for ever.") Frequently, her animals serve as catalysts to a clear vision of the human situations she describes.

Casey's life has been lived among the animals. Born 10 October 1925, in England, she is the daughter of gypsies. Her mother, Annie Maloney, was an Irish Traveler, a tinker, and her father...