Tess Taylor > Quotes

“I too am not a bit tamed, I too am untranslatable, I sound my barbaric yawp over the roofs of the world.”
― Tess Taylor, Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them

“I have a child who asks a question  of the air’s every hum. He has not learned grief. Sky, he says, and shovels soil into his mouth,  lets it drip out mud.”
― Tess Taylor, Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them

“Gardeners, are, by their nature, people who believe in regeneration, as poet Laura Villareal points out. They understand that the broken world we inherit can also be amended, with compost, worms, and steady tending. They have seen that the tended earth, in turn, offers up radical abundance—not only of food, but of insects, birds, rhizomes, and soil. The garden surprises us in unexpected ways. Oregano winters over. Wild miner’s lettuce springs back. A volunteer pumpkin luxuriates near the compost bin. Suddenly met with abundance, we beg people to come help harvest our plums. We befriend a plot of earth, and it befriends us in return. By some powerful force, this friendship brings us into a fuller, more just communion with the human and nonhuman at once. Sometimes, in the face of huge pain, the things of the earth can help reroute any of us toward awe and fascination.”
― Tess Taylor, Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them

“The form was sinking away.

The skin loosened, becoming other,
shedding the mask that hides,

but must also reveal a creature.
Off amid cliffs and hills

some unfleshed force roamed free.
In the wind, I felt

the half-life I watched watch me.
Elk, I said, I see.

you abandon this life, this earth–

I stood for a time with the bones.”
― Tess Taylor, Poetry Magazine - May 2011

“It should surprise no one that, as a poet, I’ve been tickled for years to learn that the word anthology means a “gathering of flowers.”
― Tess Taylor, Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them

“Spirits fight up through the scallions wasps shadow the crocuses with their family talk.”
― Tess Taylor, Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them