Ausable Press: Body of the World

ABOUT THE AUTHOR | SELECTED POEMS | VIEW CART

Body of the World, Sam Taylor’s first book, is the work of a poet whose sense of what it means to be human is inseparable from the physical world, about which he writes with unnerving intimacy. The voice, while grounded in the familiar landscape of twenty-first century America, is also transparent: it regards itself as integral to that place-in-time, so that to speak of the human mind and body is to speak of the world, just as perception of the world becomes perception of the physical and mental self: not himself, but the human self. Thus, his subject is the enduring mystery of consciousness in all its embodiments: memory, the rain, a credit card, death, an air conditioner, the scent of Eucalyptus. His language is like granite, a substance unto itself yet at home in the flux. As we enter what the poet has called elsewhere “a global age of distance-less information and virtual experience,” Body of the World is a necessary book.

REVIEWS & COMMENTS

Sam Taylor’s Body of the World is one of the most astonishing first books I have encountered in years. I know of no other American poet quite like him. Body of the World has much of the freshness, imaginative surprise, abundance, and linguistic energy of Rimbaud’s Le Bâteau Ivre. But Taylor is not a post-Symbolist poet. Nor does he write in the descriptive/discursive/reflective mode that comprises so much of the current American praxis. His poems read like the quantum theory funneled through language where the processes that make up a moment of experience combust in a transference or transformation of energy. His poems enact, they do not simply describe or reflect (we are worlds away from Wordsworthian moments recollected in tranquility). Modern physics tells us that every bush is in fact a burning bush, a molecular blaze. One could say the same for Sam Taylor’s poems. And what holds their fire together is his hard wrought, exacting craft. The poems in Body of the World are strange, haunting anthems of our mortal world. I read them with pleasure and with wonder.
—Joseph Stroud

"Sam Taylor's first book of poetry is strange and delicious. . . . By leading readers in with the meditative and pulling them out with the worldly, Taylor performs a rare feat: he explodes the moment of experience into a justified complexity, an earned density." —Lilah Hegnauer, Virginia Quarterly Review

"Some readers are likely to find some of the poems in this collection troublesome; frankly, I believe that 'shaking the tree' is something that poetry ought to do occasionally, and Mr. Taylor's thoughtful, evocative 'paintings' certainly alter the weary worldview of much of contemporary poetry by fragmentation and a kind of kaleidoscopic reassembly of the pieces. But far from being 'language' poetry, Mr. Taylor never leaves the concrete-iron-willed connection with the things of this earth. Indeed, of the earth itself. . . . The often painful isolation of his imagery is balanced by an examination of the small-scale tragic with a way of looking at experience which affirms a kind of spiritual grace even in the face of pain. We feel for his subjects even as we see the sense that distance gives events. This is a book to which you return again and again without fully understanding why."
—Washington Times Sun