My new collection, Across Your Careful Garden, is out now from Red Squirrel Press

It is available from the Red Squirrel Press website, price £10.00 (P&P free in the UK)

This is a different collection to the one I expected to follow Not in Nightingale Country with: hands up everybody whose 2020 did go according to plan. The poems in it were written across a period of uncertainty and upheaval, both private and public, when the world came to seem both small and very wide; isolating, and deeply (sometimes frighteningly) interconnected. The garden of the title has been a source of continuity in all this turbulence: though it too is a place of constant change, and resistant to all the best-laid plans, it helped to germinate many of these poems.

 

“Judith Taylor is a poet with antennae finely tuned to the world in which we live and what we have made of it. Her poems are deeply serious but never stuffy as she turns her clear, unwavering gaze on the realities of life in the Anthropocene. She leavens her themes with a wry, sometimes caustic, wit and an eye for quirks …

The over-arching theme is one of loss – of loved people, of vanished homes, above all of our vanishing natural habitat. Judith Taylor moves between ‘the caves [of memory] where our belongings are stored away’ and ‘the thin list/of those who might survive us’ with an enviable agility and lightness of touch. For all its refusal to look away from uncomfortable truths Across Your Careful Garden sings with a joyous response to life.”

A C Clarke
Poet and Translator

 

You can read some poems from the collection here