Andrew Taylor

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Biographical note:  Andrew Taylor was born in Warnambool, Victoria, and studied at Melbourne University. He is the author of twelve books of poetry, the libretti of two operas and, with Beate Josephi, translator of an anthology of German and Austrian women's poetry. He was regional winner of the Commonwealth Poetry Prize in 1986, and won the Western Australian Premier’s Prize for poetry in 1995. He is a Member of the Order of Australia and was until recently Professor of English at Edith Cowan University.

BIC Basic

EAN13:  9781844710430
ISBN-10:  1844710432
ISBN-13:  9781844710430
Author:  Andrew Taylor
Title:  Collected Poems
Series:  Salt Modern Poets
Product class:  BC
Language:  eng
Audience:  General/trade
BIC subject category:  CTCH1
Publisher:  Salt Publishing
Pub date:  15-Mar-04
Extent:  716pp
Height:  216 mm
Width:  140 mm
Thickness:  40 mm
Weight:  1074 gms
Supplier:   Gardners Books
Supplier:   Ingram Book Group
Supplier:   Inbooks (James Bennett)
Availability:  IP
Price:  GBP 24.99
Price:  USD 39.95
Rights:  World

Main description:  This book collects all the poems published by Andrew Taylor since his first book appeared in 1971, together with a substantial section of new work, and confirms him as one of Australia's most original and individual poets. The poems range through explorations of personal and family relationships, encounters with a wide variety of landscapes and cultures, and social and political issues. A strong sense of mortality is balanced by a delight in the details of the physical world, a fascination with everyday objects, and a belief in the regenerative power of love. Poems for children and aging or dying parents explore the hopes and possibilities of the future for the young, and the significance of a lived life for the old and those who survive them. This poetry is firmly located in the physical world, often in specific landscapes and places, ranging from the coastlines of southern and western Australia to numerous places in Europe and the USA where the poet has lived. Although many of the poems are short and meditative-lyrical, there are also several extended sequences, including one of book length written during the absence abroad of the poet's wife. Other sequences explore this relationship within a variety of geographical and historical contexts, and the importance of the beach, the coast and significance of living on an island-continent for the poet's youth and middle age. Both the physicality and the ephemerality of the physical world are given meaning and illumination by the lives lived within it, in a language that is lively and confident, yet also aware of how the richness of the world inevitably evades its grasp.

Table of contents:
The Cool change (1971)
Ice Fishing (1973)
The Invention of Fire (1976)
The Cat’s Chine and Ears: A Bestiary (1976)
Parabolas: Prose Poems (1976)
The Crystal Absences, the Trout (1978)
New Poems 1975-1980
Travelling (1986)
Folds in the Map (1991)
Sandstone (1995)
Götterdämmerung Café (2001)
New Poems 2000–2003

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Excerpt from book:  

The Whole Story

This is the whole story.
This is the part that counts.
This is the bit that can’t be told.
This is the bit we found
and are happy to bring exclusively
when our sponsors give the O.K.
This is the bit you won’t believe.
This is the bit you should
if you’ve followed the story up till now
and considered the bits we could
have brought to you but thought it best
– considering how the courts
think there are bits you shouldn’t see –
to keep it hidden from view.
This is the rationale we give
to show how objective we are.
This is the house that someone built.
This is the way we are.
This is the whole story.
These are the parts that count.
These are the bits that might be told.
These are the bits that aren’t.

Unpublished endorsement :  Andrew Taylor has a determinedly independent mind and poetic voice. He is one of the champions of his generation, and has opened paths for many Australian poets in a subtle but distinct way. A poet of world stature, he is never done with varying tone and style, and is willing to take a look anywhere that language is brewing.

John Kinsella

Unpublished endorsement :  What I like about Andrew Taylor’s poetry is the range of reference and subject matter: from the Middle Ages to Middle America, from the Renaissance to rock’n’roll, from our most primitive urges to our most civilised cultural accomplishments. There’s a lifetime of learning behind every phrase, and at the same time a patient focus on ordinary human beings just getting through the day as best they can.

John Tranter

Unpublished endorsement :  Andrew Taylor’s poetry is both richly Australian and suffused with knowledge and love of the wider world. His is not Home Verse nor Travel Verse, but Universal Verse – a lifetime’s achievement of technically adroit and sharply human utterance.

Peter Porter

Review quote:  [The Collected Poems] is a book that will live with me for months and years to come. Every time I open it to read, I find new pleasures. Taylor is a quiet poet, fastidious and precise, but this does not preclude a very wide tonal range and the deployment of a keen intelligence and wit in poetry that dazzles with its formal variety. The breadth of subject-matter is astonishing …Taylor is a distinctively Australian poet, yet he effortlessly encompasses the wider world. He is at home in Europe and America, and is a sensitive explorer of those cultures in relation to Australia … It is, of course, impossible to illustrate the richness of this book via a single poem. Suffice it to say that here is a massive contribution to the cultural hoard.

Adrian Caesar
Westerly

Review quote:  Taylor’s poems … show a cool intelligence that is modest, tolerant: caught in moments of utterance, searching for and playing with significance and attuned to their own provisionality. The ‘voice’ is speculative, emotional, formally inventive, both international and regional.

David Gilbey
Australian Book Review