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In his first poetry collection since winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Flying Change, Henry Taylor beautifully renders the vicissitudes of love, friendship, and vocation. Often using the craft of writing as a metaphor for the examined life, Taylor explores with wry wisdom the slow-dawning awareness of our evanescence. In Understanding Fiction, we find gentle regret for time spent dabbling, time spent away from the work that should rightfully claim our passion. Indeed, to understand the fictions with which we cloak our endeavors is ultimately to make what peace we can with the “consequences of ignorant choices.” We find elegiac poems of occasion as well as deft translations of the poets Kyril Kadiski, Moshe Dor, Vasily Kazantsev, and Vladimir Sokolov. We witness instants of self-willed delusion and “charged vacancy,” a split second of mournful clarity in tossing a crumpled poem into a wastebasket. Throughout this towering collection, fundamental truths blaze forth from the most inconsequential of acts: your fingers lift a cup beyond whose rim
a room bursts into clarity
and light falls on all things. In Understanding Fiction, that light falls everywhere.
Henry Taylor received the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his third collection of poetry, The Flying Change. He is professor of literature and codirector of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University in Washington, D.C.
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