Kirkus Reviews QR Code
THE PONY MAN by Gordon Lightfoot

THE PONY MAN

By

Pub Date: Nov. 8th, 1972
Publisher: Harper's Magazine Press

The Canadian folksinger's moon trip fantasy in Robert Lewis Stevenson meter, without the music but accompanied instead by Delessert's more sophisticated dreams, which are tailored here to the pastel confections that constitute the journey's end. It's mild Delessert but he manages to slip in enough of his usual surreal incidentals (a mouse's wriggly tail emerging from the mouth of a cat who is licking his lips, ponies grazing on the long, sinuous pink tongue of a profile moon, a car dangling in space with two rows of teeth for a grill, children swooshing on sliding boards into the mouths of giant white heads) to transform this lunar Candyland, which children reach by sky-riding ponies and leave on a pirate ship laden with edible treasures, and ""Where the streets are paved with chocolate/ And the trees are hung with toys/ And there's chewing gum for every one/ Of the little girls and boys.