This Tilted World Is Where I Live
New and Selected Poems, 1962-2020
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Louisiana State University Press
Published:30th Aug '20
Should be back in stock very soon
This Tilted World Is Where I Live gathers one hundred poems by Henry Taylor, drawing on over fifty years of published work by this witty, adept, and vital literary voice. Seventy-five poems appear from his previous books, spanning from The Horse Show at Midnight (1966) through The Flying Change (1985), which won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry, to his latest volume, Crooked Run (2006). The book opens with twenty-five recent poems collected for the first time.
From the beginning, Taylor has worked in both traditional and more open forms, avoiding rigid allegiance to either mode as he has responded to the world around him, from the horse farm in Virginia where he grew up, to the deserts around Santa Fe, New Mexico, where he and his wife Mooshe have lived for the past several years.
In tones and moods ranging between grief and explosive hilarity, these poems confront a consistent set of themes. Taylor has long been drawn to considerations of what we mean by loving one another, how violence can intrude without warning into innocent lives, and how the things we have always seen can change with the passage of time. Gwendolyn Brooks once wrote that he ""is a truly important poet. Familiar and strange."" This Tilted World Is Where I Live offers an invaluable encapsulation of Taylor's knack for crafting poems that are not only fun but also instructive in the art of paying attention- of which he is a master.
I have been reading and rereading the poems of Henry Taylor for nearly sixty years, and, reading the new poems in this generous collection, I remain in awe of the clarity of Henry's vision, his mastery of craft, and his unfading energy. An intimate and informal relationship between writer and reader develops line by line and poem by poem throughout the whole body of important work this book represents. A new book by Henry Taylor is a great occasion. These poems cherish—and embody in their craft—the rare occasions of 'flawlessness' that grace this life, hold time at bay, and connect us to this tilted world. Henry Taylor has never published a poem that was not perfectly imagined, perfectly shaped, perfectly paced, and perfectly moving and true.
ISBN: 9780807171783
Dimensions: 229mm x 152mm x 15mm
Weight: 320g
216 pages