I've never considered myself a fan of pastoral poetry, but Taylor has very nearly converted me in this brief collection.  Taking place across a single year of farmwork, Taylor offers sumptuous imagery of life and loss, mud and leaf, and the hands which work all of it. This alone would be beautiful reading, but what captured me is her difficult turning to the world without, the dangers to environment and the violence we wreak upon ourselves, the technology which alienates and our attention which fails.

Somehow, from poems "Apocalypto"-like to mere reveries on choice, Taylor's speaker returns again and again to the earth, this microcosm which reveals what we need, even while its experience is more and more difficult to find.

As much confession as manifesto, we are left wondering how anyone could do aught else but scrape the mud from our boots, pry apart a seedpod, caress the harvest, smile while the earth sleeps waiting.