Brief Candles

101 Clerihews

BY HENRY TAYLOR
With hilarious irreverence, Quaker Pulitzer Prize winning poet Henry Taylor takes on people usually taken overly seriously - members of the Supreme Court, poet's laureate, literary theorists, Whitewater celebrities and New Testament figures - demonstrating through 101 clerihews that one of the primary purposes of poetry is to have fun, even while holding a high standard of craftsmanship.

Louisiana State University Press 2000 51 PP. Paper

$16.95 (in stock)

The Children Of Herakles By Euripedes

TRANSLATED BY HENRY TAYLOR, ROBERT BROOKES
Translated by Quaker poet Henry Taylor this is a play about war and the effects of war within the state. Herakles, the legendary hero cursed from birth, was never permitted a triumphant homecoming. Here, his descendants continue the effort to return home, seeking asylum from the persecution of the king who had imposed on Herakles the famous twelve labors. While it pursues concepts of deep moral grandeur, it ends with a denouement of astonishing physical and ethical brutality, and affords Euripides a severe comment on what he believed was the decline of the Athenian character.

1981 83 PP. Cloth

$5.50 (in stock)

Crooked Run

Poems

BY HENRY TAYLOR
Henry Taylor is a Quaker poet, the fifth generation clerk of Goose Creek Meeting who won the Pulitzer Prize in 1986 for his book A Flying Change. In Crooked Run his poems focus on a sense of place. In the midst of suburban deveopment, he looks back at the earlier people and places with sadness, humor, and a profound sense of loss.

Louisiana State University Press 2006 62 PP. Paper

$16.95 (in stock)

The Flying Change

Poems

BY HENRY TAYLOR
Quaker poet Henry Taylor's 1986 Pulitzer Prize-winning collection of poetry. Here he is immersing himself in the beauty of the Blue Ridge mountains, pleasures for which a real farmer has neither the time or inclination. An anti-modernist in pursuit of states of grace, Taylor revels in such things as a "frisbee floating like milkweed," women's hands and "the charming old songs in their illegible syllables." His affection for his region is faithful and unmixed, and produces sweet variety in his moderate pastoral.

Louisiana State University Press 1986 55 PP. Paper

$16.95 (in stock)

The Horse Show At Midnight

And An Afternoon Of Pocket Billiards - Poems

BY HENRY TAYLOR
The poet is clerk of Goose Creek Meeting in Virginia, and, indeed the fifth in a direct line of descendants to hold that same post. This collection of 24 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.

Louisiana State University Press 2006 128 PP. Paper

$19.95 (in stock)

Understanding Fiction

Poems, 1986-1996

BY HENRY TAYLOR
In his first poetry collection since winning the Pulitzer Prize for The Flying Change, Quaker poet 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. Indded to understand the fictions with which we cloak our endeavors is ultimately to make what peace we can with the "consequences of ignorant choices."

Louisiana State University Press 1996 64 PP. Paper

$16.95 (in stock)