Tess Taylor

*I received an advance review copy for free, and I am leaving this review voluntarily.*

Hello Poetry Lovers,

As a plant and poetry lover, I had to read this and I really loved it. This was a must-read in my plant room surrounded by my plants which only added to my experience. If you do read this, you definitely have to do it either surrounded by your plants or out in nature with sunshine. Love that it was split by seasons, so you can experience it despite how it is where you are. There is also so much variety in the poems, so no matter what type of poetry you like there is something for everyone.… (más)

Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures
Review of the Museum of Modern Art paperback edition (2020)

Last West: Roadsongs is an extended prose poem inspired by the photographs of Dorothea Lange. It uses found texts from Lange's documentation of her photography expeditions during the 1930s and also from interviews of prison farm workers and migratory workers up to current times. This draws parallels to the working conditions of underclass and migrant workers from the past to the present. The photographs used (such as on the cover) are not Lange's well known portraits of people, but are instead of objects and scenes and landscapes in the workers' camps.


Food supply of migrant family. American River camp near Sacramento, California. Image sourced from Pinterest.

I picked up Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange through a recent increased interest in Lange's photojournalism work, due to 2 recent biographic historical fictions on her life in Elise Hooper's Learning to See (2019) and Jasmin Darznik's The Bohemians (2021).

Trivia and Links
The book was prepared in conjunction with the Dorothea Lange: Words & Pictures exhibition at MoMA (Feb. - Sept. 2020). There is an extensive amount of material at the MoMA link.… (más)

So often when I read a book that won an award or came from a celebrated new poet, I am disappointed--often amused to try to imagine the criteria for selection. Not so with regard to Tess Taylor and her collection "Work & Days." There are many fine lines and some fine poems in this gathering of verse inspired by hands-on farming and the reading of Virgil, Hesiod and Clare. The imagery of scent and sound and sight demonstrate Taylor's knowledge of gleaning from the soil:

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.


… (más)