Sam Taylor’s Body of the World was published in 2005, but I didn’t meet Sam until we were both in residence at the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts a couple of years ago. Because he was living in Charlottesville at the time, I invited him to come over to Staunton to participate in a reading we were hosting for poetry month that year.
Opening the book at random, here’s an excerpt from “Here in the Mountains”:
Here in the mountains, we remember
there are answers that do not reach us
in the city. Messages of wind, handed
down from leaf to leaf across the hills
of the elders; messages that die
crossing the rivers of pavement,
the oblivious thunder of engines,
the quiet knives of the clocks.
