What Comes from the Night : Poems
by John Taylor
Publication Date: September 10, 2024 | LCCN: 2024941819
Paperback: $16.95 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-052-6
E-Book: $9.99 USD | ISBN 978-1-58775-053-3
About the Book | A Poem | About the Author | Events | Praise
What Comes from the Night was a finalist in the 2025 New Mexico Book Association’s Southwest Book Design and Production Awards!
About the Book
What Comes from the Night: a question is raised and answers are promised. Yet when the poet records what the night has delivered to him in short, thought-provoking verse, new questions are suggested. John Taylor welcomes these gifts of enigmas ever transforming themselves. He also finds them, by day, in a high Alpine valley, amid troubling vestiges chanced upon in Brittany, along the Loire River near which he has long lived, and by imagining himself overlooking an American bay to which a haunting death continues to draw him. His deep-probing lines leave the reader on thresholds.
About the Author
John Taylor
Photograph © 2024 Françoise Daviet-Taylor
John Taylor was born in Des Moines in 1952. He has lived in France since 1977. He is the author of several volumes of short prose and poetry, most recently The Dark Brightness (Xenos Books, 2017), Grassy Stairways (MadHat Press, 2017), Remembrance of Water & Twenty-Five Trees (Bitter Oleander Press, 2018), and a “double book” coauthored with the Swiss poet Pierre Chappuis, A Notebook of Clouds & A Notebook of Ridges (Fortnightly Review Press, 2019). His first two books, The Presence of Things Past (Story Line Press, 1992) and Mysteries of the Body and the Mind (Story Line Press, 1998), were republished in new editions by Red Hen Press in 2020.
As a polyglot literary critic, Taylor has long been a bridge between European literature and English-speaking countries. His essays have been gathered by Transaction Publishers in his three-volume Paths to Contemporary French Literature (2004, 2007, 2011), Into the Heart of European Poetry (2008), and A Little Tour through European Poetry (2015).
Among his many translations of French, Italian, and Modern Greek literature are books by Philippe Jaccottet, Jacques Dupin, José-Flore Tappy, Pierre Voélin, Pierre Chappuis, Pierre-Albert Jourdan, Catherine Colomb, Pascal Quignard, Lorenzo Calogero, Alfredo de Palchi, Franca Mancinelli, Veroniki Dalakoura, and Elias Petropoulos. His translation of Elias Papadimitrakopoulos’s stories, Toothpaste with Chlorophyll & Maritime Hot Baths, originally published by Asylum Arts in 1992, was republished in 2020 by Coyote Arts.
A Poem
instead of light in the cradling palm
two candles of melting snow
you wonder if the watery nails
scratch away gently
the rock abandons its grip
abandons itself
drops
*
stone surfaces reassert themselves
face the fire
face you
across the valley
you were up there once
where ice glistens
in the first light
Events
Praise
A hiker, explorer, and mountaineer, the poet and translator has never been shy of bringing forward (or down) the heights of the alpine and all that rests within. As such, this is a book that is as peacefully subdued by its intellectual forays as it is charged and enraptured with that which astounds and blows up across the peaks and meadows far above most of humanity. Taylor’s poetry is most harmonious when human meets the vastness surrounding human. Witness to these spaces, while operating beyond them: the subtle gestures and recordings of the wanderer in awe.
— Greg Bern, in North of Oxford
The artful meditativeness of Taylor’s work, along with its sonic rhythmicity, is what makes it such a pleasure to read. What Comes from the Night testifies to Taylor’s complex bond with nature, a generous alliance that includes moments of introspection and melancholy.
— Clara Burghelea, “Poetry Review: ‘What Comes from the Night’ — Witnessing Tiny Secret Lives,” The Arts Fuse
Along the banks of the Loire River, the shorelines of the Quiberon peninsula in the Atlantic, or amidst the yellow wildflowers in the Alpine Garden on Mount Cenis, John Taylor’s masterful poems show us how to trust in the seeable world. At once images and mirages, Taylor’s portraits move perceptively forward with due diligence among “hints of history,” whether they are somersaulting pebbles or “wings riddled with wormholes.” These meditations invite the reader to peer with the poet into the “tiny secret lives” of the landscape before him, reminiscent of the quiet clarity of Kobayashi Issa. Indeed, Taylor’s “you” is inclusive, opening a window where one can, like a child for the first time, spot the “rabbit through the hedge” of an always-separate world. When you enter into these poems, crouched “in a lean-to under dead branches” your mind lets itself go and asks, Why have I not always rested here?
— Katie Lehman, author of Emily Dickinson’s Lexicon
Despite their visual aspect, these extraordinary poems are not fragments. Paradoxically, though crystals in the conciseness of their meaning, they are wildflowers culled from a moment’s awareness, and pressed between a notebook’s leaves. John Taylor recomposes these instants without exalting them: he achieves a verbal ascesis, the music of restraint.
— Hoyt Rogers, author of Thresholds and Sailing to Noon
As if on his first day on earth, with the eyes of a child and a man of ancient times, John Taylor writes by listening to a mystery that lives in each thing. His gaze is beckoned by moments in which things are no longer themselves and at the same time not yet something else: it is the enchantment of transmutation, of the multiple transitions through which day becomes night, darkness becomes light, and the miracle of life comes true.
— Franca Mancinelli, author of All the Eyes that I Have Opened
and The Butterfly Cemetery
Reading John Taylor’s What Comes from the Night is what it feels like to not just be part of the universe, to not just deeply explore it, observe it, name its many aspects or live under its conditions, but rather to merge with all of its particulars, accepting the reality of who we were before being conscious, who we are now while being conscious, and who we’ll always be after this kind of consciousness has passed. Through the beauty and simplicity of Taylor’s language, we’re comforted realizing that we’ve always been alive, that we continue to live and will go on living as part of life’s circular nature. However, to accomplish this life is not through any beginning or end but is rather through a desire to show how things so opposed to each other, which usually avoid each other, which cancel each other out or eventually shrink into each other’s oblivion unresolved, not only attract each other, but join this circle and deepen where each’s hidden roots mingle no matter their outward appearance or place in time.
— Paul B. Roth, author of Weightless Earth and Moments in Place