LifeTimes

Hello Miriam, thank you so much for inviting me onto your blog today. I’d like to share a poem from my second collection, LifeTimes which will be published shortly by Maytree Press.

LifeTimes is a collection of poems about human life: its phases, from birth, through childhood, adolescence, adulthood and middle age to the final years and beyond; and its pivotal moments: the shifts and connections between one phase and another, and the events that can change its course irrevocably. These themes are explored from a wide range of perspectives and through different forms and styles of poetry. Here’s an example:

Childhood      

There is an art to being a child:
to play heedless of consequence,
learn without toil, love
without possession.
Skills we gather, unaware
how fine a garment
we are weaving for ourselves.

Yet, at the moment of perfection
childhood becomes an old shirt
that no longer fits, stained
with poster paint and play-dough.
Embarrassed to be seen in it
we can’t wait to put on cooler clothes,
anoint ourselves initiates
of a world we don’t yet understand.
How comical it seems, from here,
this casting off of consummate childhood
for cack-handed adolescence:
neither one thing nor the other.

There is a point to this –
the world cannot be run by children –
but it still hurts to see
the beauty of the life we threw away
only when we are, once and for all
quite different people.
What use then for a worn-out shirt
that once belonged to someone else?

For any interested readers who happen to be in the north of England, I will be holding a launch event at Marsden Library, Peel St, Marsden, Huddersfield HD7 6BW at 7.30pm on Thursday 28 April – all welcome! I’m also reading at the Stag Café in Canterbury, 7pm Thursday 21 April and at Attic Stories, Lawrence Batley Theatre, Huddersfield, 7.30pm on Monday 25 April. Signed copies of LifeTimes can be ordered from the author at BOOKS | tetaylor. The book will also be available via Maytree Press and on Amazon.

Tim Taylor writes fiction and poetry. He has published two novels, Zeus of Ithome and Revolution Day, with Crooked Cat and a poetry collection, Sea Without a Shore, with Maytree Press; a second, LifeTimes, will be published in March 2022. His poems and stories have won, or been shortlisted in, a number of competitions and appeared in various magazines (e.g. Acumen, Orbis, Pennine Platform) and anthologies. Tim lives in Meltham, West Yorkshire, teaches Ethics at Leeds University and enjoys playing the guitar and walking up hills (not usually at the same time).

Blog: Tim’s Blog | News, thoughts and writings from Tim (T E) Taylor (wordpress.com)

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Twitter:  @timetaylor1