The Horse Show at Midnight and an Afternoon of Pocket Billiards: Poems

ISBN-13: 9780807117637 / Angielski / Miękka / 1992 / 128 str.

Henry Taylor

Opis

This collection of twenty-four poems reveals the range and power of a young Southern poet whose work is characterized by a tensile strength and a coldly factual style which beneath the surface carries great passion.

Some of the poems masterfully employ twists of irony; others utilize grotesque, yet real, characters and situations; others are nimble parodies. All of the poems, however, proclaim Taylor's sensitivity to the rhythms and idioms of everyday speech. All touch the unusual, the comic, the despairing, the hopeful.

These, then, are distinctive poems about man and his condition, informed by reality and by a simple but powerful expression.

In a career approaching thirty years in duration, Henry Taylor has established himself as one of the most accomplished poets of our time. Taylors widely acclaimed third collection of verse, The Flying Change (LSU Press), received the Pulitzer Prize in 1986. Now his first two full-length collections, The Horse Show at Midnight and An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards, published in 1966 and 1975, respectively, are brought together in one volume. The Horse Show at Midnight consists of poems Taylor wrote while still an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, and many of the poems in An Afternoon of Pocket Billiards were composed while he was in the graduate writing program at Hollins College. Despite their youthful provenance, the poems display an already emergent skill and power. The reissue of these two long-unavailable collections is an important literary event.