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Loading... Work & Daysby Tess Taylor
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In poems full of bounty, loss and the mysteries of the body, Taylor offers a rich, severe, memorable meditation about what it means to try to connect our bodies and our time on earth. In 2010, Tess Taylor was awarded the Amy Clampitt Fellowship. Her prize: A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish a first book. But Taylor--outside the city for the first time in nearly a decade, and trying to conceive her first child--found herself alone. To break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks, turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems, Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to vegetables on a small field might achieve now. Against a backdrop of drone strikes, "methamphetamine and global economic crisis," these poems embark on a rich exploration of season, self, food, and place. Threading through the farm poets--Hesiod, Virgil, and John Clare--Taylor revisits the project of small scale farming at the troubled beginning of the 21st century. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Loading... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)811.6Literature English (North America) American poetry 21st CenturyLC ClassificationRatingAverage:
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Cold Trolls
the hills even as
frozen lakes grow cloud
***
Unearthing rocks is like dislodging anger
***
Las night I woke
to wild unfrozen prattle.
Rain on the roof--a foreign liquid tongue.
She weaves her biography including a miscarriage into the soil of her reading of old poetry and the daily news and the hard working of the land.
The baby I planted this year
was only tissue....
[I}ts sac
was empty, soil black.
I bow into the absence.
***
broadcasts poppy harvests and bombings,
limbs shattering in another country--
Taylor's work is vital, in language that is not forced although sometimes choppy. Her emotions are not forced but as real as the mud and green and dying into winter. For here, planing words or seeds is the same faith and duty:
We bow to the work:
same & not same--our scattered arts--
removing, removing the stones from our soil.
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