For many, it's a time of uncertainty and isolation. But in poet Tess Taylor's humble opinion, turning to verse can provide solace. Her recent book of poems is "Rift Zone," and the following essay is part of our arts and culture series, "CANVAS."
Tess Taylor, a member of the Ashland University MFA program’s Poetry faculty, will start her one-year term as El Cerrito poet laureate on April 1. She will be helping to build El Cerrito High School’s literary magazine.
Longtime educator, Tess Taylor, says she hopes to connect local students with Bay Area’s wider literary community.
El Cerrito resident Tess Taylor was selected to serve as the City's fourth Poet Laureate during Arts and Culture Commission meeting on February 26, 2024.
Nina Burokas reviews "Leaning Toward Light" through Raven Chronicles Press
Poet Tess Taylor (59:15) reading with EcoTheo Collective 2024 AWP Off-Site Gathering
With Tiana Clark, Traci Brimhall, Jason Myers, Francisco Aragón, Ciona Rouse, and Maya Popa
Poet Tess Taylor (2:10) speaks with Ann Wallace about her new anthology Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands That Tend Them (Storey Publishing, 2023) and the ability of poems to carry us through the seasons of planting, tending, grieving, harvesting, sharing in a world filled with both joy and crisis. We reflect on the deliberate cultivation of happiness as a discipline, and at the end of our conversation, we spend some time with Tess’s most recent solo collection, Rift Zone, published in 2020 by Red Hen Press.
The garden as a place of reverence and responsibility, a practice of ample creative and spiritual rewards, comes alive in Leaning toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them. Envisioned and edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor, it is a blooming testament to the etymology of anthology — from the Greek anthos (flower) and legein (to gather): the gathering of flowers — rooted in her belief that “the garden poem is as ancient as literature itself.”
A novella steeped in nostalgia for the heyday of Berkeley cinema, a novel written during a BART commute, a report on the young men killed by football and a garden poem anthology are among the recent books with Berkeley ties.
Book review by Kristina Sepetys
As poet Aimee Nezhukumatathil explains in her forward to Leaning Toward Light: Poems for gardens & the hands that tend them, the word anthology means “gathering of flowers,” and indeed, that is what the book’s editor, El Cerrito resident Tess Taylor, has done in a collection that celebrates the impulse to tend and nurture.
14 new books of poetry are featured in this exciting guide, including titles from Forrest Gander, Ada Limón, and Matthew Zapruder.
Sept/Oct. Issue
LEANING TOWARD LIGHT: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them by Tess Taylor. Bring this outside along with your trowel and gloves—Taylor has curated a poetry anthology about the healing power of gardening and connecting with the earth.
Poet Tess Taylor reading from anthology of garden poems at Amherst College
All the gardeners I know have their favorite garden writers. Allen Lacey, Katharine S. White, Elsa Bakalar, Henry Mitchell … the list is long and endlessly fascinating. But I suspect that few of us take the time to seek out poetry about gardening. That’s a shame, because garden poetry, a venerable tradition, offers insight and inspiration to gardeners everywhere.
Gardens, like poetry, have restorative powers: Poet Tess Taylor reads from new anthology of garden poems Sept. 19 at Amherst College
All the gardeners I know have their favorite garden writers. Allen Lacey, Katharine S. White, Elsa Bakalar, Henry Mitchell … the list is long and endlessly fascinating. But I suspect that few of us take the time to seek out poetry about gardening.
Trying
I’d forgotten how much
I like to grow things, I shout
to him as he passes me to paint
the basement. I’m trellising
Spring Planting
Today I plant bougainvillea and hyacinth. Tomorrow, crocus
and candied pansies.
I am gardening, but my mind is tilling. The crows enter my yard.
They remind me of ink slabs
Deep Lane
When I’m down on my knees pulling up wild mustard
by the roots before it sets seed, hauling the old ferns
further into the shade, I’m talking to the anvil of darkness:
Working in the Garden, I Think of My Son
Who is nothing, now, but a few fistfuls of ash. Not even that, since ash
dissolves and is taken into the bodies of plants, or swept into the air
on the wind. He’s so very fine he slips undetected
Levitation
A hummingbird lights on a woody stem of the cantua,
perches there stilled and looks around. An Anna’s,
the feathers on its neck catching the light
“Gardening is like poetry in that it is gratuitous, and also that it cannot be done on will alone,” the poet and passionate gardener May Sarton wrote as she contemplated the parallels between these two creative practices — parallels that have led centuries of beloved writers to reverence the garden.
The wheel of the year is turning, as it always does, beginning its slow shift from summer to the fall. If you’re unsure of how to spend the last days of August, rest assured that even if seasons always shift, one constant you can rely on is that there will always be new books to look forward to. Below, you’ll find twenty new titles to consider picking up to curl up with on these last days of August: fiction that ranges from philosophically complex to comfortingly comedic; poems on the transcendent power of nature and gardening; nonfiction on mavericks, murder, misogyny, mother tongues, and marijuana magazines; and much, much more.
Tess Taylor on the Ancient Genre of Garden Poems and the Connective Power of Working with Plants
During the worst months of the covid-19 pandemic, when I’d suffered several losses and felt raw and isolated, I spent a great deal of time in our garden.
Poets dig into gardening themes in new anthology
SANTA CRUZ — If you truly think you shall never see a poem as lovely as a tree, a new poetry anthology might beg to disagree. “Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens and the Hands That Tend Them,” edited by El Cerrito poet and avid gardener Tess Taylor, compiles many poems from classic and contemporary poets that capture the essence of gardening and the connection to the natural world. Taylor, along with local poets Ellen Bass and Danusha Laméris — who both contributed to the book — will be at Bookshop Santa Cruz Thursday for readings and signings.
Tess Taylor Talks About Her Poetry Anthology: “Leaning Toward Light”
Tess Taylor, NPR’s on-air poetry reviewer and lifelong gardener ,discusses—and reads from—her anthology of poetry entitled Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them, which goes on sale August 29th. The collection features work by writers such as Ross Gay, Ada Limón, Jericho Brown, Robert Hass, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, and more. In her foreword to the book, Aimee Nezhukumatathil notes that the word anthology means a “gathering of flowers,” a perfect way into this collection, which offers an abundance of writing that celebrates a tactile connection to the natural world and the way in which gardening, like poetry, can help return us to ourselves.
A celebration of gardening in new poetry anthology
To tend a garden is to engage with hope, that this seed, pressed into the dirt, will rise and grow. It is to engage with nourishment, resurrection, beauty, and other real things of this world: sun, soil, rain, seasons. A new poetry anthology edited by poet and gardener Tess Taylor celebrates gardening and the garden in a sweeping variety of contemporary poems.
After a summer rife with extreme weather events—Canadian wildfires big enough to darken U.S. skies, floods, extreme heat—readers could use a reminder that a more caring relationship with Earth is possible. They will find it in Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands That Tend Them (Storey Publishing, August 2023), which offers a lush bouquet of verse by authors exploring what it means to garden “when the natural world is collapsing, and where...we have not yet managed to cultivate widespread abundance, nourishment, or peace,” as editor Tess Taylor writes in her introduction. Setting the tone for the collection is Ross Gay’s now-famous lyric “A Small Needful Fact,” which considers the tragic irony that Eric Garner—who was killed in 2014 by a New York City police officer’s chokehold—worked in horticulture and therefore made “it easier / for us to breathe.” Jericho Brown remembers the morning glories that his mother grew in “Foreday Morning,” Mark Doty compares weeding to a way of fighting existential dread in “Deep Lane,” and Jenny Xie counts the ways a garden “sets off the mind’s tripwires” in an excerpt from “Tending,” among other hearty selections. At the start of each section, an author offers a prose meditation and a recipe, such as Jane Hirshfield’s braised fava beans. Bright illustrations of curling green tendrils and pink and purple buds make the collection a feast for the eyes as well as the mind. As Aimee Nezhukumatathil reminds readers in her foreword: “[T]he word anthology means a ‘gathering of flowers.’ ... How perfect, then, to have this gathering, this flowering, of poems, about the connection of hand to earth.”
Garden poetry reading at Bookshop Santa Cruz
Much like reading a good poem, caring for plants brings comfort, solace and joy to many. The Bookshop Santa Cruz welcomes poets Tess Taylor, Danusha Laméris and Ellen Bass at 7 p.m. Aug. 31 at the store,1520 Pacific Ave. Santa Cruz for a reading of their beautiful anthology “Leaning Toward Light: Poems for Gardens & the Hands that Tend Them.” The book contains an inviting selection of poems from a wide range of voices that speak to the collective urge to grow, tend, and heal, and celebrate our connection to the green world.
In ‘Leaning Toward Light,’ tending to life through a garden of poems. Tess Taylor's anthology gathers verse giants and local greenhorns, recipes and short essays into an almanac of living.
Leaning Toward Light
An Interview with Tess Taylor
When my mother inherited my grandmother’s house after her passing, I spent one afternoon sitting by the long patch of plants and flowers my grandmother would tend to when I was younger. Read more…
Tess Taylor, an avid gardener and acclaimed poet, lives in El Cerrito, where she tends to fruit trees and backyard chickens.
As editor of “Leaning toward Light”, Taylor has brought together a diverse range of voices to celebrate the natural world and the human connection to it. Some of the contributors include Ross Gay, Jericho Brown, Mark Doty, Jane Hirshfield, Ada Limón, Danusha Laméris, Naomi Shihab Nye, Garrett Hongo, Ellen Bass, and James Crews.
Read More…
LEANING TOWARD LIGHT: POEMS FOR GARDENS AND THE HANDS THAT TEND THEM, EDITED BY TESS TAYLOR
In the late spring of 2020, when everything seemed a bit bleak, I received a phone call from my old friend Hannah Fries, a poet who’d known me when I was writing poems and working on a farm in the Berkshires. Hannah is now an editor at Storey Press, and she had a fascinating proposal for me:
