If Night is Falling

Book excerpt: Poetry. Literary Nonfiction. "For some thirty years, John Taylor has been diving as a critic into the torrents of modern European poetry; that is, into the different national literatures which, in addition, have accepted as their own kin some of the best American poetic voices, such as those of Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, or Wallace Stevens. John Taylor is very familiar with the rich aquatic life of these European rivers; in fact, he is one of the best-informed connoisseurs of what is going on in continental poetry, with all its lively diversity. But his critical books, which show his attentive, empathic reading of work written by others in the various hearts of European poetry France or Germany, Italy or Serbia, Greece or Slovenia, or the more northern countries are not the topic of this introduction. This introduction is about his own poetic prose, which relates his early childhood in the American Midwest. Yet in their stylistic techniques and symbolic depths, his writings indeed subtly reflect certain kinds of European poetics." Veno Taufer"