In an interview with Donald Hall, critic Alberta Turner asked him how the reception of "Names of Horses" would be affected since the subject had little familiarity for the modern reader. How would a reader approach such a poem "when the experience has become a historical curiosity associated with calendar towels and department store windows at Christmas"? Turner is referring to the nostalgic images of horse-drawn sleighs and teams pulling a wagon full of hay; in other words a romanticized vision of the old-fashioned "simpler" times. Clearly, Hall is writing about an era that has fallen away, a way of life and a style of working that were quickly disappearing from the American landscape in the twentieth century.

But in "Names of Horses," the local mirrors the universal. Telling the story of one farm is a way of capturing and honoring the life of all farms...