In 2010, Tess Taylor was awarded the Amy Clampitt Fellowship. Her prize:
A rent-free year in a cottage in the Berkshires, where she could finish
a first book. But Taylor outside the city for the first time in nearly a
decade, and trying to conceive her first child found herself alone. To
break up her days, she began to intern on a small farm, planting leeks,
turning compost, and weeding kale. In this calendric cycle of 28 poems,
Taylor describes the work of this year, considering what attending to
vegetables on a small field might achieve now. Against a backdrop of
drone strikes, methamphetamine and global economic crisis, these poems
embark on a rich exploration of season, self, food, and place. Threading
through the farm poets Hesiod, Virgil, and John Clare Taylor revisits
the project of small scale farming at the troubled beginning of the
21stcentury. In poems full of bounty, loss and the mysteries of the
body, Taylor offers a rich, severe, memorable meditation about what it
means to try to connect our bodies and our time on earth.