Grassy Stairways - Taylor John

After the twilight ambience of The Dark Brightness, here comes Grassy Stairways. These poems and poetic sequences are often morning- born. Taylor at once meditates on and observes Alpine landscapes, wind, clearings or edges of woods, an alluring hinterland, a “soothing” saxifrage, remains of a fire, not to mention those portholes through which he watches islands going by and, at the same time, wonders about decisive journeys that we all must take. All this poetry originally stems from the American writer’s collaborative projects in different formats—livres d’artistes, livres uniques, and livres pauvres—with the French artist Caroline François-Rubino. She has stated that she “paints what she cannot photograph.” Similarly, Taylor writes, as it were, at various intersections of inner and outer worlds. Often the boundaries blend. He records these “apperceptions,” these privileged moments of awareness in which one becomes intensely and enigmatically conscious of one’s own processes of thinking, feeling, or looking. What meaning can be glimpsed in such intricate sensations? In what ways do they suggest what “aliveness” might more deeply be, or imply? In spare, subtly haunting language that brings out the semantic resonance of certain key words, Taylor seeks what emerges “behind the present / beyond / inside.”

—Jeremy Alden