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I read Tess Taylor’s Work & Days on a subway ride from Manhattan to Brooklyn. There was a delay, but I wasn’t in a hurry, and actually welcomed the time to finish the book because the quality and rhythm of the poems drew me along as naturally as a minute becomes an hour and a day follows a day.
The poems are short, but as full as a planted row becomes full of growth. The poet gardener plants and tends and because the toil is as real as another row to hoe, it ends in a harvest of observations and insights that I find to be pleasurable and true, not tiring, but ready for another season, another planting, and another reading too.
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I recorded Tess Taylor reading at KGB last April. In the video, she begins and ends with poems from Work & Days. Enjoy.
Those two poems Tess Taylor reads from Work & Days follow.
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Beside the Thaw
We bow into the rows that winter tore.
March tenders this warm day.
Our shovels grunt inside the mulch.
We tamp down muddy beds, lay burlap paths,
Prod bodies out of water slumber.
Pile fieldstones by the spring.
Work one row to clean and then another.
Unearthing rocks is like dislodging anger.
We break and sit along the ragged grassline.
Eat beside the thawing river.
Our backs too are small stones in the sun.
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Solstice (Eclipse)
The papers said “once in a generation”
and that morning looking out on snow
we read how the full moon darkened,
and for an hour our earthly shadow
stretched bloodred across the plate-white moon.
Then it passed and the wide round moon
turned its lone eye on fields and silos.
We hadn’t seen it, hadn’t tried, had been asleep.
The miracle swam above our faces
possibly the moment that I dreamed
again of the new planet we had seen.
Once-in-a lifetime glimmer, the first gleam:
Or the froggy kick of newborn legs—
O fresh swim in my dark ultrasound.
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Work & Days is published by Red Hen Press. You can check it out here:
https://redhen.org/book_author/tess-taylor/
You can find more work by Tess Taylor here:
https://www.tess-taylor.com/
Tess Taylor
Tess Taylor reads from Last West: Roadsongs for Dorothea Lange