Poetry as Page Turner

It's not quite a triumphal march, but after nearly a year of hiding in plain sight, Bruce Taylor's selected No End in Strangeness is finally getting some attention. Over at Maisonneuve, David Godkin and Mathew Henderson are both excited by the discovery:

"Above everything, it’s the ease of these poems and Taylor’s style overall that makes him so readable in my view, accomplishing something I wouldn’t have thought possible in the turgidity that makes up so much modern poetry, i.e. poetry as page turner. No End in Strangeness is a book that hits far more often than it misses. A real pleasure to read and easily recommended."

And in a long review for Contemporary Poetry Review, Bill Coyle is similarly wowed:

"[Taylor's poems] combine clarity, subtlety and musicality in a way that leave most of the poet’s contemporaries (he was born in 1960) standing still. A book about entropy and failure, No End in Strangeness is a resounding success."

Sunday Poem

SERVICE RIG

Half these men are boys, like you are, but yell
so loud the cracks in their voices are hard to catch.
The other half, giants, older than the rig itself,
they knew this oil before it was black. A bare chest
here is thin and folded into itself a thousand times.

You’ve never seen them take the head off the pumpjack,
it’s clean in the dirt when you arrive, but you get to see
the service rig rising, the tongs turn on. Watch the youngest
man on crew climb the derrick and stand, harnessed,
coveralls dropped from his chest and tied with the sleeves
around his waist. Up where no one can yell at him to zip up,
no one can tell him to remember Charlie, where he can feel
the prairie wind beating his chest like the skinny fists
of a woman who almost wants him to let her go.

by Mathew Henderson, from Maisonneuve #42

(Photo: "Oil Rig Worker" by Richard Avedon.)