Work & Days

by Tess Taylor

In 2010, Tess Taylor was awarded the Amy Clampitt Fellowship. Her prize: A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish a first book. But Taylor—outside the city for the first time in nearly a decade, and trying to conceive her first child—found herself alone. To break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks, turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems, Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to vegetables on a small field might achieve now. Against a backdrop of drone strikes, “methamphetamine and global economic crisis,” these poems embark on a rich exploration of season, self, food, and place. Threading through the farm poets—Hesiod, Virgil, and John Clare—Taylor revisits the project of small scale farming at the troubled beginning of the 21st century. In poems full of bounty, loss and the mysteries of the body, Taylor offers a rich, severe, memorable meditation about what it means to try to connect our bodies and our time on earth.

Genres: Poetry

72 pages, Paperback

First published April 8, 2016

About the author

TESS TAYLOR’s chapbook, The Misremembered World, was selected by Eavan Boland for the Poetry Society of America’s inaugural chapbook fellowship. The San Francisco Chronicle called her first book, The Forage House, “stunning” and it was a finalist for the Believer Poetry Award. Her second book is Work & Days, which Stephen Burt called “our moment’s Georgic.” Her work has appeared in The Atlantic, Boston Review, Harvard Review, The Times Literary Supplement, and other places. Taylor chairs the poetry committee of the National Book Critics Circle, is currently the on-air poetry reviewer for NPR’s All Things Considered, and was most recently visiting professor of English and creative writing at Whittier College. Taylor has received awards and fellowships from MacDowell, Headlands Center for the Arts, and The International Center for Jefferson Studies. Taylor recently was awarded a Fulbright US Scholar Award to study and lecture at Queen’s University Belfast, in Northern Ireland, for six months in 2017.

Reviews

[Erica Wright · Rating 5 out of 5]

In Work and Days, Taylor gives us modern nature poems, the ancient and the political colluding through seasons and over fields. The result is comforting—catastrophe held off for a little while (for a little peace). In “Four Summers,” that tempered optimism can be seen in lines like “All winter we will feed on light and soil.” That “we” is important, as well. These are not navel-gazing poems, but a reflection on agrarian societies, their persistence in the face of technology. A consistent, melodic book that's quieter than a lot of new poetry collections; you'll bend toward the lines, eager to hear their murmurs.

Postcard Review: http://ow.ly/10AZvY

[Kristin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really brilliant book about what it means to be human and exist in the natural world.

[Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

beautiful pastorals that ask questions like how do we live in a world on the brink of ecological disaster, how do we cope with the seasons/the changing, and what do we do when the war is so far away

[Rosamund Taylor · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first poem by Tess Taylor I discovered was Apocalypto w/ Radio, which is an astute and moving observation of climate change in the midst of an ice storm. She writes how hard it is for humans to envisage global change, or anything outside our immediate experience, "it is hard to fathom any road // beyond the road you're on, to think of summer / overheating this cold world, to imagine summer // from inside a mountain storm." This poem is contained within Work and Days, which is a series of poems about nature and climate, seen through the lens of a year spent working on farms. Taylor is excellent at capturing how the very small -- the tomatoes currently being harvested -- can echo the global. This collection is also about creation: the creation of food for the body and food for the spirit, and the magic of conception and birth. Taylor writes about tilling the soil, removing stones and debris, and how this evokes the creation of poems and other art, as in her poem Method: "In the dirt you dig fragments. Turn them and ponder." These poems are full of beautiful, jewel-like images, and are enjoyable to read: she uses expansive, free-verse lines that fall easily into the mind.

However, though I found this collection worthwhile and engaging, at times it's repetitive, with certain refrains turning up again and again, such as the idea of fruit and vegetables making sugar out of light. It does not have the weight to make the repetitions feel earned. I also take issue with nature poetry that is relentlessly pretty: there are many aspects of our relationship with nature that are pitiless, painful, or frankly disgusting. A collection of nature poems that does not address this rings hollow, as in Mud Season when Taylor describes "black fruit / swings free of the strings that bound it" and "grotesque extruded peppers". These descriptions are too vague and do not get to the heart of the rotten, post-snow season. In Harvest Fair I was annoyed by lines like, "Anthropomorphic gourds on a trencher": this isn't clear. Does Taylor mean that there are carved pumpkins? Does she mean squashes and marrows that look phallic? What's a trencher in this context?

This being said, Taylor is clearly an accomplished poet, and the conceit of looking at the year and the wider climate crisis through the lens of farm work is very successful. This is a rich, delicately balanced collection, full of beauty and passion for the natural world.

[David Anthony Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

So often when I read a book that won an award or came from a celebrated new poet, I am disappointed--often amused to try to imagine the criteria for selection. Not so with regard to Tess Taylor and her collection "Work & Days." There are many fine lines and some fine poems in this gathering of verse inspired by hands-on farming and the reading of Virgil, Hesiod and Clare. The imagery of scent and sound and sight demonstrate Taylor's knowledge of gleaning from the soil:

Cold Trolls
the hills even as
frozen lakes grow cloud
***
Unearthing rocks is like dislodging anger
***
Las night I woke
to wild unfrozen prattle.
Rain on the roof--a foreign liquid tongue.

She weaves her biography including a miscarriage into the soil of her reading of old poetry and the daily news and the hard working of the land.

The baby I planted this year
was only tissue....
[I}ts sac
was empty, soil black.
I bow into the absence.
***
broadcasts poppy harvests and bombings,
limbs shattering in another country--

Taylor's work is vital, in language that is not forced although sometimes choppy. Her emotions are not forced but as real as the mud and green and dying into winter. For here, planing words or seeds is the same faith and duty:

We bow to the work:
same & not same--our scattered arts--
removing, removing the stones from our soil.

[Felicia Steele · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is what I said for the Sigma Tau Delta Convention Blog

As Convention Chair for the Sigma Tau Delta 2019 International Convention in St. Louis, MO, Eastern Regent Felicia Steele chose the 2019 Common Reader, Work & Days, by Tess Taylor. In this week’s blog Steele shares her connection with Taylor’s poetry collection and how the work and days of farming and gardening that Taylor speaks of resonate deeply with Steele’s work and days as an academic.



“It must be so fun to have every summer to spend with your family.”

“It’s great that you get to walk away from your job each summer.”

“Teachers have it so easy. You can spend the whole summer at the pool.”

Everyone who works an academic job, whether at the college level or at the K-12 level, hears some variation on the themes above. Since students (most of them) walk away from school during the summer, many people presume that academics do too.

Without question, our work has a seasonality to it. In late August and early September, we meet our new students, welcome them to campus, direct them to hidden bathrooms and illogically numbered classrooms. In October, we scramble to submit abstracts to conferences the following summer, or submit our own professional materials to our campus committees while our students plan their Sigma Tau Delta convention submissions. In November, we frantically write letters of recommendation. We usually get two or three weeks of relative quiet in December and January once we’ve finished our fall grading. But those few weeks “off” are usually filled with convention planning and feverish writing as we struggle to meet our spring deadlines. And the spring semester carries on in much the same fashion. And then summer comes, and we frantically try to prepare for the year ahead of us: planning, researching, writing, and often teaching so that students can graduate on time and on budget.

Our work as academics is much like the work of the farmer or avid gardener. When we are invisible to the world, we are just as busy, just out of sight. Perhaps that’s why Tess Taylor’s book of poetry, Work & Days, resonated so deeply to me.

TessTaylor-WorkandDays

Every spring, I assiduously sow my “vertical garden” (my bookshelves) with new seeds (book orders), so that I can harvest ripe fruit (planned syllabuses) in the fall. And at the end of the academic year, I take my robe and goofy hat off their hanger and celebrate my students’ accomplishments. Sometimes I’ve barely caught my breath or turned in my grades. I often feel, as Taylor says in “May Day,” that “The parade I barely noticed was beginning / is already halfway down the street” (40).

Tomatoes
Tomatoes from Felicia’s summer vegetable garden.

Work & Days invites us to stop and be attentive to small moments that we too often ignore as we rush toward our next deadline or chase after our next project. Taylor invites us to pay attention to scent and sound and texture: to “Dirt and weeds and greens and starts” (41). She encourages us to pause and reflect on our work so that we aren’t left startled and wondering “Wasn’t it last week that all this ripened?” (67).

So to return to those opening questions: summer is no different with my family than any other time of year, nor is it any different than it would be if I were another kind of doctor. I spend lots of time driving my daughters to camps so they can be occupied and entertained while I am at my desk contemplating changes to present participles in Early Modern English or John Donne’s complex and variable meters.

But this summer, I will do something a little different. I will take a moment each month and pay more attention to those elements of summer that are too often cast aside as annoyances, but that Tess Taylor shows me can be moments of beauty. So in “High July,” I will be aware of the way “On vines eggplants wobble” while “everything humid / this weedy too-muchness” tilts “past fullness” (48). I will spend some time beneath a tree reading Tess Taylor’s poetry thinking of my own work and the days ahead of me. As the chair for the St. Louis Convention, I look forward to reading your reflections on and responses to her poetry. As you are thinking of next year’s calendar for your own chapters, consider ways you could put together events related to the common reader. Taylor regularly reads at college campuses, so she also may be available for local events depending on her schedule.

[Anders · Rating 4 out of 5]

"We too are small against great constellations.
We plant when the sun shines. We augur & pray."

Borrowed this from my roommate since I was seduced by the Hesiod reference. It's a nice slim volume of very readable modern pastoral poetry. I use pastoral pretty loosely here, but as a description its a good one. The poems are half farming life/nature imagery, half rumination. I'd say the thing that stood out the most was the readability, the poems are just very accessible. Some beauty here and there, a dash of the tragic, routine routine routine. Give it a read if you want some poetic farm life in your life.

Time on Earth
i
"New to country stars, you try
to identify the constellations.
Cassiopeia, Andromeda--

You half forget their stories.
But on warming nights you see them
& your throat fills with hymns,

some ancestral body's holdfast tunes
to which your words are also blurred or blurring."

[Steve Chisnell · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've never considered myself a fan of pastoral poetry, but Taylor has very nearly converted me in this brief collection. Taking place across a single year of farmwork, Taylor offers sumptuous imagery of life and loss, mud and leaf, and the hands which work all of it. This alone would be beautiful reading, but what captured me is her difficult turning to the world without, the dangers to environment and the violence we wreak upon ourselves, the technology which alienates and our attention which fails.

Somehow, from poems "Apocalypto"-like to mere reveries on choice, Taylor's speaker returns again and again to the earth, this microcosm which reveals what we need, even while its experience is more and more difficult to find.

As much confession as manifesto, we are left wondering how anyone could do aught else but scrape the mud from our boots, pry apart a seedpod, caress the harvest, smile while the earth sleeps waiting.

[Erin · Rating 4 out of 5]

2/31
I cannot remember how I happened upon this book, but Tess Taylor is from El Cerrito, so I was destined to do so. She wrote this while spending a year in the Berkshires, where she farmed and wrote and this is what came of it. And I am so glad it did.

From “Epilogue”

May those who are hungry be fed.
May those who have food also hunger for justice.

We bow to the work:
same & not the same--our scattered arts--

removing, removing the stones from our soil.

[Jen Selinsky · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tess Taylor's second published work is rife with vivid imagery. Work & Days paints several pictures about the art of cultivation and farming. Whether the poet writes about topics, such as: food preparation, the fragile condition of man, the Earth and its ecosystem, pandemics, and the harshness of the seasons, her work is entirely relevant, even more so today than when the book was first published. Taylor weaves a tapestry of some of her finest works in her thoughtful and poignant compilation.

[James Korsmo · Rating 3 out of 5]

I didn't connect well with Taylor's poetry, though that may say more about me than about it. Maybe I need to return to it at a different time. She evidences some of the close observation that you see in Annie Dillard's A Pilgrim at Tinker Creek. And there are shades of Robert Frost in the everydayness of many of her subjects.

[Emily Kidd · Rating 3 out of 5]

I only read this book because I’m planning to go to the 2019 Sigma Tau Delta convention and Tess Taylor is the keynote speaker. I am not a modern poetry critic so I can’t say exactly why I didn’t enjoy it much except that I didn’t connect to the ideas; I can’t relate to her experiences and the poetry did not enlighten me to them {but at least I have a signed copy lol}

[Noema · Rating 5 out of 5]

Elegant and biting.

[KP · Rating 4 out of 5]

Garden imagery, I like.

[Be Storie · Rating 2 out of 5]

Seamus Heaney ?

[rhea · Rating 5 out of 5]

how do people think so beautifully

[Roger DeBlanck · Rating 5 out of 5]

Taylor’s poems make keen observations of the fields, crops, fruits, and vegetables she tends to and harvests over the course of a year. Using fresh and vibrant language, she shares her passion and regard for the phenomena of seasonal changes and the wonder of the natural world. She also expresses her concerns for the larger world with its ongoing wars and for human pain and suffering. This is an excellent volume not to be missed.

[Alison (The Lowrey Library) · Rating 4 out of 5]

Received this from a Goodreads giveaway (God bless you), and read in one sitting. There's a beautiful cyclical quality to the writing in this collection. Taylor weaves nature (specifically gardening) and the pains of life with ease. Bravo.
I did think it was a little (and only a little) repetitive, which is why I didn't bestow a perfect five stars. However, I found it thoroughly enjoyable, descriptive, and thought-provoking.

[Terry · Rating 3 out of 5]

If I'd been reading this in search of but one good line, I'd have found it. If I'd been reading in search of but a tiny handful of very good poems, I'd have found them, too.

[Janet]

I absolutely loved this book. The author is a kindred spirit. If you like earthy poetry, you will love this one.

[Lauren · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved the Forage House more, but this was still great.

[Nadine in NY Jones]

May Day
BY TESS TAYLOR

They go, the early flags, the gory maples—
so too the daffodils & Lenten roses.
Other petals swirl & nights warm.

Buds thicken and cast shadows:
in a thunderstorm
I almost forget the ice that was.

Narcissi suckle watery paths;
meadows heap up emerald masses.
How green & I want to delight

except this undertow—it pulls so fast
passing before I recognize it—
like souls in Dante who can’t see the present,

white lilacs curdle in pre-summer heat.
The parade I barely noticed was beginning
is already halfway down the street