ABOUT Chuck Taylor Chuck Taylor CHUCK TAYLOR, a Texas Yankee reared in Texas, Minnesota, Illinois, and North Carolina, won the Austin Book Award for his collection, What Do You Want, Blood? He has worked in the Poets- in-the-Schools program, been a CETA poet in Salt Lake City, operated a used bookstore, worked in the laundry of a hospital, labored for the Terrill State Mental Hospital and the Texas School for the Deaf, owned a small press, and is the former Coordinator of Creative Writing at Texas A&M University. Conversations with the poet Lucien Stryk in 1967 stimulated his interest in Asian culture and he was able to work and study in Japan from 1991-94. Married three times, he has three children, three stepchildren, and six grandchildren. Vincent, Chuck Taylor dreams, has red hair and he embraces him as his alter ego.” | ||||||||||
“Chuck Taylor’s Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon presents a fusion of eastern and western sensibilities in a series of image-filled meditations, some long, some short, on a life rich with a variety of experiences. Two characters dominate— Vincent, the impressionistic visionary, and Li-Po himself, who is reinvented as Vincent’s mirror or foil. Nature is infused with light and human relationships are shot through with darkness in these bold, exploratory poems.” “Chuck Taylor brazenly borrows the clear, wise, and consistently wry voice of the ancient poet Li-Po to speak of life, love, and fatherhood in the 21st Century. Using the synonymous name and voice of another character, Vincent, Taylor brings the reader the angst of guilt and regret of a failed relationship with a daughter poignantly reminiscent, in tone to W. D. Snodgrass’s iconic, Hearts Needle. The honesty that embodies these poems touching the many aspects of one man’s reflections on the many mistakes and successes that a fully lived life always brings will resonate with any reader. This book, like the “box of jewels” in the ending verse of his poem, Li-Po’s, appears to hold, “copies of every poem / he floated / all those years /down river.”
|
A few poems from Like Li-Po Laughing at the Lonely Moon by Chuck Taylor
Li-Po’s Fin Fresh from the waters she rose, all It was no moon, you fools, in the slow Tanka As the wind stirs dark
Tanka for Clair A bright ardent moon
|
|||||||||
Copyright © Pecan
Grove Press, |
|