Shedding Knowledge by Christopher A. Taylor
This debut collection introduces a significant new talent to Canadian poetry. With reflective, almost meditative precision, these poems pierce our firmest illusions, the geographical and psychological, inviting us to cross a perceptual threshold into a realm “rich and strange,” yet strangely familiar. “I like to write / in a lean voice”, says Taylor, and that leanness has both the stark lineaments of the Canadian Shield, and, surprisingly but appropriately, the wry, laconic, yet sensual perceptiveness of Tang poetry. In Taylor’s poems we shed knowledge to make room for new knowledge to emerge.
Through five sections—Geography, Whimsy, Gloom, Getting Older, and Come Again—Taylor’s quiet wisdom loosens our sureties, and lets a freshening breeze into our musty corners.
"Christopher Taylor’s poems move between orient and occident, light and dark. They celebrate human rites of passage and engage in moments of intensity and change, a change which he finds often signaled by shifts in the external world, in known and familiar landscapes. Taylor’s poems lead the reader into luminous meditation, eulogy and elegy."
—Karen Mulhallen, Editor of Descant
Now available!
Book Details
May, 2007
ISBN 1-896350-23-2, 978-1-896350-23-3
71pp. softcover
Price $14.00
Excerpts
Poem - A steady diet
About the Author
Christopher Taylor was born in Sudbury and returns every year to spend part of his summer at his family camp on Long Lake. Initially influenced by Pound and Waley, he is a student of Asian poetry and philosophies and his interest in these areas is reflected in much of his writing. His poetry has been published in numerous literary journals across Canada, including Fiddlehead, Grain, Descant and Queen's Quarterly. He has also published short fiction in the Malahat Review and Quarry. He continues to write both fiction and poetry, as well as explore the middle ground where philosophy, fiction and poetry meet.
Christopher has degrees in mathematics and law and has taught mathematics, practised law and worked in the software industry. He has lived in Northern and Southern Ontario, as well as Manitoba and Nova Scotia. He is married and he and his wife have three children. After living for many years in Ottawa, he has recently moved to British Columbia.