3 Review(s)

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.