Captive Voices gathers selections from Taylor's five previous books along with a generous helping of new poems. Scintillating, unusual, passionate, and profound, the poems range from contemporary pieces about a bag lady on a bus, to historical pieces about settlers held hostage and a wartime nurse caring for British wounded, to intensely personal poems about her dislike for her grandmother and worries about her son. The title poem -- a real tour de force -- explores the notion of captivity on several levels as it speaks to the suffering we all endure, some of which is of our own making.
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- Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008?
- The Memory of Bones: Body, Being, and Experience among the Classic Maya (Joe R. & Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American & Latin).
Decidedly regional yet determinedly universal, the poems in this remarkable volume, along with a foreword by Ellen Bryant Voigt, attest to the singular talent of a woman justly described as "a poet of genius. How to write a great review. The review must be at least 50 characters long. The title should be at least 4 characters long.
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She was no more cowed by Furies than she was by the men who gobbled her pigs-in-blankets in the house where she and Peter kept the summer thermostat above 80 degrees, perhaps because they felt most at home in the heat to which they had become accustomed in their youths. She generally wore freshly pressed, short-sleeved shirtdresses, and I never noticed a single drop of perspiration on her brow—unlike my own, being of that later generation acclimated to air-conditioning—as she graciously made her way through sweaty and largely ignorant crowds, people who knew nothing of her own poetic accomplishments and were thrilled only at being in the home of Peter Taylor.
This is not to say that in those years Mrs.
Review: Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, | Ploughshares
Taylor's activities were confined to hosting aspiring writers with large appetites. In quieter hours, she and Peter he insisted on being called by his first name, and I somehow managed to comply were reading aloud to one another the collected letters of Elizabeth Bishop, and Mrs. She had also been reading, she told me, a great deal of "subliterary material"—Southern history, letters and biography, especially as these pertained to women.
Taylor doubtless heard over and over when she was his student. Her remark planted a seed in me that strives to blossom almost 20 years later as I continue work on a manuscript that contains much of my own family history, and also that of the Mississippi bluesman Robert Johnson. Taylor's immediate family, which was composed of four writers, deserves a history of its own. Also contained in the collection, edited by the inimitable Jean Valentine, for whom this was surely a labor of love of the most demanding sort, are superb pieces by Betty Adcock another excellent Southern female poet who has never gotten her due , Jarrell, Richard Howard, Adrienne Rich, the increasingly indispensable James Longenbach, and Voigt, who is Mrs.
Taylor's own natural literary heir in many ways. Taylor could be scathing in conversation and correspondence during the years we saw and wrote each other regularly. She described one prominent editor as a downright "sadist," especially with young writers. Indeed, she said she suspected him of requesting work from promising younger writers merely for the pleasure of composing what he imagined were especially witty rejection notes.
She saw even people she obviously loved with the same clear-eyed vision. There are several lovely, poignant poems about Jarrell in her canon, but she wrote me a letter once, after I had sent her an audiotape of Jarrell reading aloud, which characterized his reading style as "coy, half-condescending, over-emotional. Taylor's work is "my set," which comes from an earlier—and, yes, scathing—poem, "The Painted Bridge.
Its hot water supply had been cut off, so she went home and attempted to set her hair herself. She looked, she said, so frightful that she didn't think she should appear in public. In its poetic context, however, "my set" is obviously a reference to more than her coiffeur. She's speaking of her set station in life as the lifelong partner of her far-better-known husband, and the station in life imposed by Southern womanhood—the set to which she belongs, not necessarily by choice. And, perhaps most important of all, she's referring to the set to which she has confined herself.
Taylor's entire canon can be summed up by the vivid, singular and, yes, sometime furious titles she chose for her work.
- Reward Yourself.
- WHERE DO BROKEN HEARTS GO? : A NOVEL.
- Hans Teufel (German Edition).
- Pet Sitter Part II - My Luscious Pet Sitter, My Beautiful Wife, and Horny Me.
- Political Poetry Previously Performed At The Poor Poets Pub Primarily Picking On Professional Politicians And Other Hard-core Unemployables.
Taylor's anger is surpassed by her lyric gifts. Anyone can be angry at the limitations imposed by—oh, dear God, let us outgrow those terms of "race, class, and gender," but for now, they're what we've got—the hand that life deals us, but Mrs. Taylor has never had any use for whining for a better hand or for looking back at the cards she might have been dealt. In the last letter I received from her, she gave me, as both a consolation for loss and a warning, the best advice of my life, and perhaps my work as well: All poets wish to leave behind first-caliber work that, however absurdly overlooked and under-known in her life, will last.
And on this particular score, Mrs. Taylor has no reason for self-pity whatsoever.
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Two helpful links I hope: Jan 04, D. A marvelous selection of poems by a poet often overlooked. What a great find! Pat Johnson rated it it was amazing Feb 07, Ian Bodkin rated it it was amazing Nov 11, Catherine rated it it was amazing Dec 30,