Captive Voices

Captive Voices - Cover

New and Selected Poems, 1960-2008

by Eleanor Ross Taylor

Southern Messenger Poets

168 pages / 6.00 x 9.00 inches / None

ebook available

Poetry

Paperback / 9780807134122 / May 2009

Winner of the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize

Winner of the PSA William Carlos Williams Book Award

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Finalist

Over nearly fifty years, Eleanor Ross Taylor has established herself as one of the foremost southern poets of her generation. Captive Voices gathers selections from Taylor's five previous books along with a generous helping of new poems. Scintillating, unusual, passionate, and profound, the poems range from contemporary pieces about a bag lady on a bus, to historical pieces about settlers held hostage and a wartime nurse caring for British wounded, to intensely personal poems about her dislike for her grandmother and worries about her son. The title poem--a real tour de force--explores the notion of captivity on several levels as it speaks to the suffering we all endure, some of which is of our own making. Decidedly regional yet determinedly universal, the poems in this remarkable volume, along with a foreword by Ellen Bryant Voigt, attest to the singular talent of a woman justly described as "a poet of genius."

Eleanor Ross Taylor is the author of five previous volumes of poetry, including Wilderness of Ladies, Days Going/Days Coming Back, and Late Leisure. The recipient of the Shelley Memorial Prize awarded by the Poetry Society of America, the Library of Virginia's Virginia Prize for Poetry, and the Aiken Taylor Award for Modern American Poetry, she lives in Virginia.

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