• Age: 16
• Grade: 11

Shortlisted for the 2007 Governor General's Award for Poetry
Shortlisted for the 21st Annual Trillium Book Award for Poetry in English
Finalist for an Ottawa Book Award

Part history, part invention, Muybridge's Horse is a sensual biographical long poem that follows the career of Eadweard Muybridge, a nineteenth-century British-born photographer whose studies of bodies in motion led to the invention of moving pictures.

Whether navigating hallucinogenic American deserts, violent coastal geographies, or a feral 1850s San Francisco, Rob Winger's tale uses an inventive combination of poetic styles and voices, recounting early attempts to capture images on glass. Searching out stereoscopic beauty, Winger's version of Muybridge carries portable darkrooms from the heights of Yosemite's domes to the depths of the North and South American coastlines, and ultimately onto an 1878 race track, where a battery of fifty cameras settles a bet about a horse's stride, forever changing the world's understanding of movement.

Charged with murder, accused of neurosis,compelled to record ruins and wage-slavery, Muybridge conveys the violence implied by the photographic act and the blunt details hidden behind our histories. Elegantly told, Muybridge's Horse is an evocative exploration of history, personal obsession, passion and negatives.

Rob Winger grew up country in small-town Ontario before graduating to post-punk and new wave. His first book, Muybridge's Horse, was named a Globe and Mail Best Book for 2007, and was shortlisted for the Governor General's Award, Ottawa Book Award and Trillium Book Award for Poetry. An active editor and teacher, Rob recently completed a PhD in literature and cultural studies in Ottawa. He and his family live in the folk-rock hills northeast of Toronto. His second collection of poetry is The Chimney Stone (2010). Visit Rob's website at http://www.robwinger.blogspot.com/

Rob Winger's profile page

• Winner, CBC Literary Awards

"One of the most impressive Canadian poetic debuts in recent years, the book is a sustained lyric meditation on the life of Eadweard Muybridge, the 19th-century British-born photographer whose groundbreaking work led to the invention of moving pictures. In it Winger offers us a fascinating portrait of the man who made the classic photo sequence of a horse's stride in split seconds; that changed, in a literal flash, the world's understanding of movement, and bestowed upon Muybridge the immortality of an enduring place in history.

Though Winger calls his work "a poem in three phases," the book could easily be called a novel in verse. Muybridge's Horse is more linear and plotted than many Canadian books that have passed as novels, and the titles that separate this long poem into smaller units do not frame individual, small poems as much as they divide the narrative into chapter and scene. Winger self-consciously capitalizes on the remarkable melodrama of Muybridge's true story. There is an affair, betrayals, a murder; there are a trial and a verdict; there are successes and failures as the world watches.

The book is divided into three chronological parts, each part containing "albums" that map a period in Muybridge's life. We begin with an account of his early work with harsh chemicals and plates, and his acrobatics to pull off trick shots. His courtship of Flora and their marriage are told in her intimate voice, then her lover's bold self-introduction launches the story of sexual intrigue that ends with a man being shot and Muybridge standing trial.

The second part of the book explores Muybridge's nine years in Guatemala, where he documented the operations of European-owned coffee plantations. The third takes us back to the US, where under the patronage of Leland Stanford (of Stanford University legacy), Muybridge captures a stallion's airborne moment, then spends over a decade at the University of Pennsylvania cataloguing various forms of human and animal locomotion, until his retirement.

Winger's main mode is a functional, almost prosy, lyric narrative voice that nods heavily to an early Michael Ondaatje prose, in cadence and sensibility, as if the author had The Collected Works of Billy the Kid close at hand as a how-to manual on a literary approach to a historical subject. The style is so reminiscent of Ondaatje that Winger has not yet come into his own voice. Still, his talent is clear and he has huge potential to translate these inherited techniques into his own distinctive music.

One exquisite surprise in Muybridge's Horse is the section on Guatemala. Winger makes up for a few leaden passages that describe photographs in exhausting detail with delicate threads of his own first-person voice. By inserting moments of his research and study of the photographs into the story, he brings himself, the morning-coffee-sipping Rob Winger, into the narrative as a character, touched by Muybridge's witness to the brutality and beauty of the coffee plantations.

A book to be read once through for the dramatic story of a man who ate lemons and maggoty cheese, once for the sweet phrasings and then again for the nuanced comment on the photograph as a historical document, Muybridge's Horse is a remarkable achievement. Nightwood, the publisher, deserves a special nod for the cheeky horse-and-rider silhouettes that grace the bottom corners of the text. I dog-eared my copy in less than a day, from thumb-flipping the pages to see the little guy go.
--Sonnet L'Abbé, The Globe and Mail

Review in <i>The Globe and Mail</i>

"Winger poeticizes with vivid and arresting results... overall, this history told through poetic fragments becomes and intriguing literary analogue of Muybridge's photographic technique."
--Aaron Giovannone, Canadian Literature

Canadian Literature

"Muybridge's Horse has to be admired. A nearly 200-page book, Winger works through the biography of 19th-century photographer Eadweard Muybridge, whose work in the 'studies of bodies in motion led to the invention of moving pictures.' Working a large, complex canvas, Winger builds his long poem as a kind of poetic novel as he writes through the facts and fictions of Muybridge's life - a journey from England, through America's deserts to San Francisco. It culminates at a famous 1878 racetrack where 'a battery of 50 cameras settles a bet about a horse's stride, forever changing the world's understanding of movement'".
--rob mclennan, Ottawa Xpress

Xpress

"...a very ambitious first book of poems...Muybridge's Horse is at once a biography, a portrait of an age and a depticion of the early years of photography."
--Cary Fagan, The Gazette

"One of the most impressive Canadian poetic debuts in recent years ... A book to be read once through for the dramatic story of a man who ate lemons and maggoty cheese, once for the sweet phrasings and then again for the nuanced comment on the photograph as a historical document, Muybridge's Horse is a remarkable achievement."
--Sonnet L'Abbé, The Globe and Mail

"This poem, Muybridge's Horse, is so finely achieved - its luminously sustained lyric, its compelling narrative, its inventiveness and virtuosity."
--Dionne Brand

"Rob Winger has captured, in beautiful vignettes, the astonishing life of Eadweard Muybridge. With lavish imagery, Winger evokes the emotional intensity of a photographic genius caught up in the birth of a new technological era."
--Governor General's Award Jury, 2007

Governor General's Award Jury

"Anyone who has seen Muybridge's astonishing photography will be equally astonished by Winger's story of the man himself. It is hypnotizing."
--P.K. Page

"This is a book one should feel proud of. It's certainly one of the strongest, most daring, original and polished debuts I've seen in some time and one that should be discussed. It serves as a reminder to young poets. Don't rush. Don't rush. Let the project build beyond what you dreamed you could achieve."
--Sina Queyras

Sina Queyras

"Sustained energy, focus, and a wide array of special lenses make Rob Winger's first book a serious accomplishment."
--Ken Babstock

"Muybridge's Horse is a fine piece of reading...It is a book that, in itself, demands rereading."
--Amanda Jernigan, ARC Poetry Magazine

ARC Poetry Magazine

Muybridge’s Horse: A Poem in Three Phases

This is a fascinating biographical poem about Eadweard Muybridge, a pioneering British-born photographer. The poem begins with a stagecoach accident that, though it nearly killed Muybridge, fueled his passion for photography. In stark and elegant language, Winger constructs the interior landscape of a mad genius who murdered his wife’s lover. After being acquitted for justifiable homicide, he went to Central America to do his greatest works. His most famous feat was to strategically set up fifty cameras during a horse race, which successfully captured the split second where all four legs of the horse are off the ground. This sequence of photographs led to the development of the motion picture.

In 2003 Winger won first prize for the CBC Literary Awards (Poetry) for selections from the still incomplete manuscript of Muybridge’s Horse.