Last week the Poetry Foundation named Eleanor Ross Taylor winner of the 2010 Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize for lifetime achievement for Captive Voices: New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008. Ross Taylor's most recent collection has also been awarded the William Carlos Williams Book Award by the Poetry Society of America and was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Poetry.
One of the most distinguished voices in poetry, Ross Taylor is nonetheless lesser known compared to many of her contemporaries — who include Randall Jarrell, Adrienne Rich, Richard Howard.
Little concerned with promotion, poetry readings or other requisites assumed by poets today, she has focused on the writing, and in it,she is guided by an inner compass. It is what I admire most about her work. But it is not an easy path, for the poet or those around her, as we learn from the slyly humorous "Always Reclusive," which begins:
"I'm constructing my own briarpatch. True,
I'm still bleeding from the first canes I dug in;
thorns fight off cultivation, cut both ways;
they like barbwiring things in ...
And concludes:
"The blackberry, permitted its own way,
is an unmanageable plant." Here's a
variety called "Taylor": "Season late,
bush vigorous, hardy... free from rust"
That's it. Don't let my briarpatch rust.
I love the hard, and hardy, 'b' sounds — briarpatch, bleeding, and the surprising 'barbwiring," — smacked up against the self-deprecating humor of the unmanageable, late-blooming Taylor.
The collection is rich with narratives, monologues, dialogues, voices heard and voices silenced. Ross Taylor works in words in much the way a visual artist builds a collage, bumping voices and images up against each other, not explaining, letting the shards and sharp edges reflect off each other, trusting her readers to — literally — read between the lines.
In "Long-Dreaded Event Takes Place," she writes:
it blurs
happening as on canvas
distanced...
glazed eyes catching
small smithereens:
the nurse's ring
bone pink smooth though modified
the brief convulsive reflex
and the driver's shoes well tied
everything establishes
my absence in this scene
later somewhere
I'll paint-in gaps, fill in
the larger picture,
withholdings spilled...
Of course, that will never happen. Written after her husband Peter Taylor's death, it perfectly captures the shell-shock of grief, and one might assume the poem is about that. But Ross Taylor does not fill in the gaps. She does not 'share.' She is a master at withholding. It is her power. It makes her poems difficult, but worth the struggle.
In presenting the Lilly Award, Christian Wiman announced that 10 of Ross Taylor's poems will be featured in the May issue of Poetry, giving her work wide readership. It is worth seeking out.
