Work and Days by Tess Taylor
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

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.

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