Pia Tafdrup writes: ' Tarkovsky's Horses is about loss in a double sense. The themes of the poems are my father's increasing forgetfulness, his loss of his faculties and then my loss of a father. The book is a poetic portrayal of the course of an illness for which science has few words - my father begins to suffer from dementia, and then he has to go into a nursing home, where he dies. Disintegration of identity and its inexorable progress are followed through every phase, in a concrete and naked form that makes use of the myth of Orpheus and Eurydice. The poems about a father who forgets more and more are set in a border landscape which is also not without its comical aspects. The poems narrate the drama of what it is to be a human being.'