Description
In LifeTimes we find the author contemplating 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. Tim Taylor’s wonderful collection paints a poetic family portrait underlined by universal themes.
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Chris Preddle –
These are truthful, wise and moving poems about an ‘ordinary’ lifetime (as if any were such) made compelling by the poetry. Most poems are about childhood, early life, parenthood and family life, with some valedictory poems and elegies at the end. Tim’s approach is straightforward, without affectation or rhetoric, so that I feel with these feeling poems. Lines and phrases are felicitous and right, there are some strong and unusual metaphors, and Tim has a real gift for the last line of a poem. He has a good sense of form and often uses stanzas of free verse, with occasional traditional forms and rhyme. I liked especially ‘Candy Floss’, ‘To My Daughter’, ‘The Cowrie Shell’, ‘Still Waters?’ and ‘Christmas Card Friends’. And the opening and closing poems contain the whole beautifully, in a slim volume with a cover of nine photos of a continuing lifetime.