Henry Taylor received the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his third collection of poetry, The Flying Change. His other books include ""The Horse Show at Midnight"" and ""An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards"" (poems) and Compulsory Figures: Essays on Recent American Poets. He is professor of literature and codirector of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C.
Taylor (Compulsory Figures, LJ 8/92) finds the poetry in ordinary moments in his elegant poetic fictions, as when "a flock/ of starlings settles down like a cast of seeds." Searching after Truth, he discovers irony in forms large and small. He cannot remember where he was when either of the Kennedys was shot but recalls clearly the first time he saw "a twist-top taken from a bottle of beer." There is irony, too, in the poet's surrender to a woman truck driver, who skillfully directs him out of a tight spot. Taylor is a virtuoso, as shown in his handling of triplets, sonnets, free verse, syllabic verse, topical poems, and even translations from Russian, Hebrew, and Bulgarian, noting: "you learn/ a language/ for the sake of its poetry." Highly recommended.-Daniel L. Guillory, Millikin University, Findlay, Ill.
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