Let Them Be Left: Isle Royale Poems

by Keith Taylor

Keith Taylor’s fourth poetry chapbook with the press is a collection of intimate observations of what he finds in his immersion in the wildness of Isle Royale and what he feels upon reemergence into “Twenty-first Century Wild.”

In 1991 the National Park Service began an Artist-in-Residence program at Isle Royale and Keith was chosen as one of the first three artists that summer. Twenty-eight years later he was asked to be a Returning Artist-in-Residence, both to recreate his earlier time on the island and to help mentor some young artists chosen for the Teen-Artist-in-Residence program, a new effort to expand the now established program he had been a part of so many years earlier. The poems and prose passages in Let Them Be Left are the result of that 2019 fifteen-day stay, sometimes picking up on the themes in his work.

Genres: Poetry

30 pages, Paperback

Published January 1, 2021

About the author

Keith Taylor was born in British Columbia in 1952. He spent his childhood in Alberta and his adolescence in Indiana. After several years of traveling, he moved to Michigan, where he earned his M.A. in English at Central Michigan University. He has worked as a camp-boy for a hunting outfitter in the Yukon, as a dishwasher in southern France, a housepainter in Indiana and Ireland, a freight handler, a teacher, a freelance writer, the co-host of a radio talk show, and as the night attendant at a pinball arcade in California. For more than twenty years he worked as a bookseller in Ann Arbor, Michigan. Then he taught in the undergraduate and graduate creative writing programs at the University of Michigan, and directed the Bear River Writers Conference. From 2010–2018 he worked as the Poetry Editor at Michigan Quarterly Review. He retired from the University of Michigan in 2018. He lives with his wife in Ann Arbor; they have one daughter.

Librarian Note: There are more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name.

Reviews

[Keith Taylor]

I won't rate it, but here's a lovely little review that Kathleen Kirk wrote a couple of years ago for the web site "Escape Into Life" web site:

What a charming and essential chapbook by Michigan poet Keith Taylor. It places us on Isle Royale, an island in the northwest part of Lake Superior, with thrush and eagle, dragonfly and loon, cedar and spruce, wolf and moose. As it says in the Introduction, “If Lake Superior is shaped like the head of a wolf, then Isle Royale is the wolf’s eye.” It’s a National Park, and much of it is also a Designated Wilderness Area. The wilderness, the beauty, the flora and fauna—“let them be left,” this chapbook convinces us, from the opening epigraph, in this phrase quoting Gerard Manley Hopkins, and moment by moment, as we keep reading Taylor’s Let Them Be Left: Isle Royale Poems.

The very first poem, “Waves,” sets up anticipation:

the lake looks confused
in that good way

just before the dance
begins

“My History at Isle Royale” adds a complication:

I use walking sticks now, step slowly
from rock to rock, find my footing
among the roots.

Our guide is older now, his route a bit more precarious. There is “no need for nostalgia here” and both urgency and peace in his memories and observations. In “When the Eagle Came to Her Nest,” he remembers “the hesitation in the air // as she spread her wings…// as added pressure / in my chest.” I feel it, too.

There is joy in bushwhacking, a counting of jays, awe at the stars, knowledge of public spots and secret trails, respect for creatures at rest or carrying on with their lives, and through it all a sense of what would be lost if we don’t “let them be left” here, mostly undisturbed by human beings, and compassion as well for those humans, their “cities beginning to die as their water tables fall.”

There’s a big picture in this small book. As Taylor sums it up in “Twenty-First Century Wild,” “I’m not sure if my focus has narrowed or if I’m finally thinking about the whole world!”

On this little island, with gulls calling, dragonflies swooping, eagles diving, wild iris blooming, life thriving in sun or in fog, the speaker of these poems can live hushed and amazed, apart from the screens, the stresses, the woes of civilization, glad and briefly apart from the sad truth:

Here alone in all this space
I cannot believe our world is dying.

Maybe, if we pay attention the way these poems do, our world can live again.

–Reviewed by Kathleen Kirk, EIL Poetry Editor

[Isabella · Rating 5 out of 5]

Loved this little chapbook, whose nature-themed poetry reminded me of Robert Frost and Mary Oliver.