Customer Reviews

The Flying Change: Poems

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

This book reveals that poetry can be both accessible and compeling. Taylor combines a conversational style with traditional poetic forms to create a contemporary style that is a true descendent of the work of Robert Frost and E.A. Robinson. Be sure and read "Landscape with Tractor", "Taking to the Woods", & "At the Swings." I highly recommend this book. And, if you haven't read poetry in years and have found the thought of it daunting, try this book as a great reintroduction, or introduction for that matter, to what poetry can offer.

Ever since the very first time I heard a poem from this collection ("Barbed Wire" specifically), I have been wowed by the weight of darkness behind all these poems. There is a great deal of power in these words and the world it portrays is far from a happy one. However, there is a real momentum and energy to everything in this book.

And be warned, this collection is far from banal. From finding a dead body in a field while mowing tall grass to having a finger torn off while shoeing a horse, the poems in this book inhabit a very dark place. Much of this is tonally due to the fact the Taylor was an admitted alcoholic at the time of creation of most of these poems. His subsequent work is produced largely after his sobriety and a turn for the better in his personal life.

Also, the previous reviewer might do well to note that the presence of "Airing Linen" almost cost Taylor the Pulitzer. This is largely a work of form-free emotion, artistically descended from James Dickey, and should not be expected to sing like a nursery rhyme, rather to quote "Barbed Wire" it "hums like a bowstring in the splintered air"

I loved every single one of the poems in this remarkable collection; it's no surprise why Henry Taylor won the Pulitzer. One reviewer made the comment that Taylor's work isn't Pulitzer material because it doesn't rhyme or something . . . That's truly misguided. Most of the poets who try to rhyme in this day and age really [bad at it] at it. I mean, that's putting it mildly. If you are a poet, or want to be a poet, my advice is: whatever you do, don't rhyme! Taylor is a great poet, and it's too bad he isn't discussed more.

Are you frickin' kidding me? Am I to understand this book received the Pulitzer? These sound like poems from a somewhat better-than-average first-year MFA student. Please, for God's sake, give yourself permission to call a spade a spade and don't get suckered by the aggressive political correctness, formal conservatism (cowardice), and marketing schemes that dominate the so-called "art world" of America. These poems are just lifeless, banal, as somebody else said, common, not at all courageous, and they take no risks, and the poet shows no genuine emotional vulnerability that I can see, but simply retreats into easy, pre-packaged emotional conventions. There is no invention here. No dark sensual body of life. This is the greatest of insults: the poet assuming his reader won't know any better.

I first read "The Flying Change" about five years ago and enjoyed it. Then I went back to school and got my master's in literature and reread Taylor's book and all my old enthusiasm was gone. This was not Pulitzer material. On the other hand, given the abominable state of today's poetry, maybe it was. I've given this book a "3" only because there were a few rhymed pieces in it, which were marginally better than the others, although the subject matter is universally banal throughout.