Description
- Kind: Perfectbound
- Pages: 116
- Language: English
- Date Published: August 2025
- ISBN 978-1-962847-30-8
Praise
Ann Taylor does what a good poet does. She picks and sorts images that inform the reader about every aspect of the world around her. She is an astute observer intrigued by memory, identity, family and all living things. There are so many voices that make these poems come alive. The storytelling is pitch perfect and the emotional tone makes my heart pound. The poems cascade down the pages, serious and playful, teaching us how three generations, and a fourth in its infancy, have appreciated and respected this local pond. Horn Pond: The Way I See It, is a kind of love story that urgently needs to be told and Ann Taylor has accomplished this with grace and poetic skill
– Judith Hoyer, author of Imagine That
Consciousness rises up from nature’s expanse in Ann Taylor’s remarkable ode to Horn Pond—the poet’s launching pad, her sometimes home, and her poetical retreat. Taylor’s family, as well as hawks, ospreys, gulls, blackbirds passing through, and princely frogs share their fears and sadnesses in a seasonally cathartic, but timeless, convocation. Solidly embedded in this natural world, Taylor delights in poking the mysterious edges of creation and exploring the parallel, multi-faceted aspects of life itself. The results mesmerize
– Dennis Daly, author of Odd Man Out
Excerpt
The Way I See It
He chose the hill house with the pond view
for raising four kids. He walked there,
fished there, skated figure-eights so well there
he made the local newspaper – my grandfather’s pond.
Not always so. A kettlehole, an Abenaki campsite
on Innitou, then Horn Pond, a country excursion
for flounced, feathered, but too-often-unfit
canoeists – a killer pond, residents warned.
An iced-up pond where cutters with horses
carved out crystal blocks of Yankee coolness
for faraway exotic drinks – a job my uncles
escaped from in their Model-T.
A child’s view from my bedroom window, a site
for hiking, swimming, skating, but too my mother’s
doom of death by drowning – a terror
to keep me safe.
So much, so many gone before me.
Geese skid in, depart this gray day
acting out my own brief passage through.
My pond for a time.
Author
Once a Professor of English at Salem State University in Massachusetts, Ann Taylor has written two books on college composition, academic and free-lance essays, and a collection of personal essays, Watching Birds: Reflections on the Wing. Her first poetry book, The River Within, won first prize in the 2011 Cathlamet Poetry competition at Ravenna Press. A chapbook, Bound Each to Each, was published in 2013. Her collection, Héloïse and Abélard: the Exquisite Truth, published in 2018, is based on the twelfth-century story of their lives. Her collection of poetry, Sortings, was published in 2020 by Dos Madres Press, and her most recent collection, Looking After: Poems, was published in 2024, also by Dos Madres Press. She is currently at work on poems about her long experience as a teacher.
