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9781587750526

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Along the banks of the Loire River, the shorelines of the Quiberon peninsula in the Atlantic, or amidst the yellow wildflowers in the Alpine Garden on Mount Cenis, John Taylor's masterful poems show us how to trust in the seeable world. At once images and mirages, Taylor's portraits move perceptively forward with due diligence among ""hints of history,"" whether they are somersaulting pebbles or ""wings riddled with wormholes."" These meditations invite the reader to peer with the poet into the ""tiny secret lives"" of the landscape before him, reminiscent of the quiet clarity of Kobayashi Issa. Indeed, Taylor's ""you"" is inclusive, opening a window where one can, like a child for the first time, spot the ""rabbit through the hedge"" of an always-separate world. When you enter into these poems, crouched ""in a lean-to under dead branches"" your mind lets itself go and asks, Why have I not always rested here? - Katie Lehman, author of Emily Dickinson's Lexicon Despite their visual aspect, these extraordinary poems are not fragments. Paradoxically, though crystals in the conciseness of their meaning, they are wildJowers culled from a moment's awareness, and pressed between a notebook's leaves. John Taylor recomposes these instants without exalting them: he achieves a verbal ascesis, the music of restraint. - Hoyt Rogers, author of Thresholds and Sailing to Noon As if on his first day on earth, with the eyes of a child and a man of ancient times, John Taylor writes by listening to a mystery that lives in each thing. His gaze is beckoned by moments in which things are no longer themselves and at the same time not yet something else: it is the enchantment of transmutation, of the multiple transitions through which day becomes night, darkness becomes light, and the miracle of life comes true. - Franca Mancinelli, author of All the Eyes that I Have Opened and The Butterfly Cemetery Reading John Taylor's What Comes from the Night is what it feels like to not just be part of the universe, to not just deeply explore it, observe it, name its many aspects or live under its conditions, but rather to merge with all of its particulars, accepting the reality of who we were before being conscious, who we are now while being conscious, and who we'll always be after this kind of consciousness has passed. Through the beauty and simplicity of Taylor's language, we're comforted realizing that we've always been alive, that we continue to live and will go on living as part of life's circular nature. However, to accomplish this life is not through any beginning or end but is rather through a desire to show how things so opposed to each other, which usually avoid each other, which cancel each other out or eventually shrink into each other's oblivion unresolved, not only attract each other, but join this circle and deepen where each's hidden roots mingle no matter their outward appearance or place in time. - Paul B. Roth, author of Weightless Earth and Moments in Place

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John Taylor, born in Des Moines in 1952, has lived in France since 1977. He is the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently The Dark Brightness (Xenos Books, 2017), Grassy Stairways (The MadHat Press, 2017), Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (The Bitter Oleander Press, 2018), and a ""double book"" coauthored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges (The Fortnightly Review Press, 2019). As a polyglot literary critic and translator from French, Italian, and Modern Greek, Taylor has long been a bridge between European literature and English-speaking countries. His translation of Elias Papadimitrakopoulos's stories, Toothpaste with Chlorophyll & Maritime Hots Baths, originally published by Asylum Arts in 1992, was republished in 2020 by Coyote Arts.

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