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Henry Taylor

Henry Taylor is the author of five volumes of poetry, including the Pulitzer Prize–winning The Flying Change, and a collection of essays on contemporary poetry entitled Compulsory Figures. Since his retirement as professor of literature and codirector of the MFA Program in Creative Writing at American University, he lives in Bethesda, Maryland, when not traveling the country in his motor home.

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Vision at Woods’ Edge

Winter 2005 | Poetry

Just a glimpse, doubtless nowhere near accurate, through train window into the New Jersey thicket past which we plunged in our self-absorbed hurtling out of countryside into the urban explosion, a mere glimpse: Farmall tractor squat on flat tires, ma [...]

A Trace of Old Road Work

Winter 2005 | Poetry

There was a time this road was narrower, the blind curve sharper. In due course the state was moved by equal parts of fact and fear to smooth the curve with drill and dynamite. One drill bit sank too deep into the rock to be withdrawn, so they left [...]

The Dining Room At Springdale

 The Springdale Country Inn is two driveways down from mine, so I go by it often enough that I need not think, each time I pass, of all I saw there, or heard about. Through childhood I was a regular guest in the dining room, at the dark table wi [...]

A Few Lessons From Horses

For several years, off and on, I have been thinking about what it has meant to my life that the first 20 years of it were dominated by my involvement with horses. In describing that involvement I will run the risk of sounding as if I could turn and l [...]