The River Within
by Ann Taylor

Description

The River Within is the 2010 winner of the Cathlamet Prize for Poetry.  “Enriched with felt experience, classical knowledge and fidelity to a shared literary heritage, the poems in The River Within are page after page of pure pleasure. Ann Taylor’s deft use of form, controlled lines, and awareness of craft combine with an astonishing precision of description to deliver that rare and refreshing thing: intelligent poetry. Taylor animates mythology, relives travels, and inhabits antiquities in surprising ways, revealing iconic lives, alive again. These are the poems of an accomplished poet: observer, thinker, and lover of the things of this world, current and past.” (Joan Houlihan)

Comments:

“Ann Taylor’s poems record her surprise at the natural world and her own surprising responses to nature’s enduring harmonies. She reflects with a graceful exactitude the shadows of her presence in the provinces of bloom, growth, and release. The repetitions of her forms echo the natural world’s recurrences; her images capture what can be seen as well as her faith in what can’t. Her lines wear the fortitude and valor of the evergreen.” (Parkman Howe, Poetry Editor, Appalachia)

Excerpt:

Cleopatra’s Conquest

“Where’s the bronze donkey bearing
baskets of fresh olives, and the sturgeon
delivered by slaves fingering flutes?

Where are the flamingo tongues,
ostrich heads, milk-fattened snails,
hares winged like Pegasus?”

Mark Antony mocked, nibbling
the plain pancake, chicken leg,
dessert fig placed before him.

“And where the other twenty-one courses,
the jesters, jugglers, revolving ceiling,
the sprinkler’s subtle perfume?”

“Call me the Queen of Plenty,” she replied,
announcing her aim to devour
the most lavish meal ever all by herself.

She removed her huge pearl earring,
the largest in history, a king’s treasure,
richer than all Roman banquets combined,

dropped it into her cup of wine vinegar,
and as it sizzled
drank it.