The Time When Horses Return (2014) is the seventh poetry collection of Ra Heeduk, a poet who has paid close attention through her warm, delicate gaze to the faces of life and depths of senses in concise and restrained forms. The winner of the Sixth Im Hwa Literary Prize, The Time When Horses Return is acclaimed for Ra Heeduk’s “own unique adaptation of the love for the others that resonates with the poetry of Im Hwa,” an avant-garde poet and critic who laid the foundation for research on the modern Korean literary history. The book is filled with Ra Heeduk’s quiet yet resolute determination to look at the world anew and find the voice seeping into the dried, detached mind at the tail end of mourning and heartbreak. From the first page, the poet, whose earlier works focused on the subtle interaction between the vegetation and the earth enduring the fate of self-sacrifice and even extinction and on the trajectory of its creation, identifies with a tree and projects herself on the image of a dried, brittle branch.  

In The Time When, Ra Heeduk, as a tree, begs to be made into a coffin in the exact position she is standing, lest the blooming and blossoming era of Eros ever come. We, the readers, aren’t made to immediately grasp the origin of this obsession with the position of death. We are but left to crudely speculate about the reason by noticing that most of the poems in Chapter 2 are mourning “you,” who passed away in a car accident. The fate of death that the poet repeatedly speaks of is never dawned on “you” alone, but on all of us at some point. Having passed through a time of suffering, the poet presents the power of love that embraces the pain of loss and absence in this book. The poet starts again after burying “you” in the coffin. The book shows how Ra Heeduk, standing on the other side of depression, resolves to face the world, of which she is a part, once again.

Ra Heeduk began her literary career by winning the JoongAng Ilbo New Writers Contest in 1989. Her published works include the poetry books To Roots, The Word Tinged The Leaves, It Isn’t Far, What Is Darkening, The Missing Palm, Wild Apple, The Time When Horses Return, File Name: Lyric Poetry, A Possibilis; the collections of critical essays From Where the Purple Comes and A Plate of Poetry; and other essay collections including A Half-Bucket of Water, Remember Those Lights, To Get There One Step at a Time, and The Wrinkles of Art. She is a Professor of Creative Writing at Seoul National University of Science and Technology.