Looking After-Poems

This collection explores many subjects that demand looking after - family, artistic achievements including literature, the natural world, memories, history, and others that call for tending to. It also focuses on the complexities of this engagement - when easy, when difficult, when the subjects are shaded by emotion or the effects of time. Then too there is the looking after, as in afterwards, the reflection on things gone by. These poems cover a broad range - small personal experiences to the grander occasions of life, and the memories of life. They explore the multi-faceted subject of alert custodianship - the necessity of paying daily attention, while at the same time tending to the past already lived.

About the Author
A long-time Professor of English at Salem State University in Massachusetts, Ann Taylor has written two books on college composition, academic and free-lance essays, and a collection of personal essays, Watching Birds: Reflections on the Wing. Her first poetry book, The River Within, won first prize in the 2011 Cathlamet Poetry competition at Ravenna Press. A chapbook, Bound Each to Each (Finishing Line Press), was published in 2013. Her collection, Héloïse and Abélard: the Exquisite Truth (WordTech Editions), published in 2018, is based on the twelfth-century story of their lives, and her most recent collection, SORTINGS, was published by Dos Madres Press, in 2020. She is currently at work on a collection of poems focusing on Horn Pond in Woburn, Massachusetts (Horn Pond: The Way I See It), near which she grew up and where she now lives again.