| Winner of the 1986 Pulitzer Prize for Poetry
Henry Taylor’s poems in The Flying Change embrace
a wide range of subjects and tones. Taylor's concern with
the rural anecdote, demonstrated in his two earlier books
of poetry, The Horse Show at Midnight and An Afternoon
of Pocket Billiards, is here broadened to include not
only funny stories called “snapshots” but also extended meditations
on change and death.
Several of these poems take up the dark themes of
the world’s randomness and our helplessness in the face of
unforseen disasters. In “Landscape with Tractor,” the mundane
task of mowing a field is interrupted by the discovery of
a decaying corpse. In other poems Taylor treats similarly
macabre situations with an undertone of dark humor, as when
he writes of inviting the lightning in while bathing during
a thunderstorm.
Throughout, Taylor combines everyday speech with careful
control of form. In the title poem, "The Flying Change," he
explores the equestrian term literally and metaphorically.
but for a moment the shifting world suspends
its flight and leans toward the sun once more,
as if to interrupt its mindless plunge
through works and days that will not come again.
I hold myself immobile in the bright air,
sustained in time astride the flying change.
From “The Flying Change” published in The
Flying Change: Poems by Henry Taylor.
Copyright © 1985 by Henry Taylor. All rights reserved.
The poems in this collection are sometimes disturbing, sometimes
gentle and peaceful. They are all the work of a poet who writes
carefully and thoughtfully.
Henry Taylor is professor of literature at American
University. In 1984 he received the Walter Bynner Foundation
Poetry Prize from the American Academy and Institute of Arts
and Letters.
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