Prose Elements (1969-2003)

by Thomas Lowe Taylor. 004 ISBN 1-930259-38-7 Anabasis. Xtant Books. 512 Mountainside Ct. Charlottesville, VA 22903.

Book Review by Michael Basinski

Thomas Lowe Taylor is a multi-dimensional artist. He is poet, prosesist, photographersist and all around literary experimentalist who has been pushing against the limits for thirty years.

Pushing against the hard rock is hard work and a hard place in which one poet finds himself. There is no support from the greater literary world for the hard at work intrepid artist like Thomas Lowe Taylor. When I first heard his name I heard Thomas Lowe Taylor was geology prof. or a geography teacher. Geo this or geo that and maybe I don’t remember very right. But one senses him working with and at, seeking elements of for and a poetry in these prose works all about one poet’s poetics. Elements, elementals here now are called Prose Elements. If I could find one poet, among many, who Thomas Lowe Taylor might find an anchor it seems to be that poet would be Charles Olson and then it fits perfect about the elements and hard places, like continents bumping into each other. So this book is a collection of very complex but thoroughly exciting working out of poetic notions, prose writing essay statements and poetic thinkings. Like Olson and Pound, it is collage in its wide bridging informational impact. A life of reading and writing and poetic consideration and experimentations has gone into these essays and prose sections and it is a wonderful experience to read one mind alive in poetry. In his afterworld he writes that this is trance writing. Of course it is because in, so to speak, trance is where the metaphors and literary leaps occur. They occur here most wonderfully. But also in structure these are creative, trance like essays, and extend and develop Olson’s projects to the point where these are Thomas Lowe Taylor’s projects. Good creative and informative poetic essays about poetry are in short supply. If you thirst, wanna get tranced, here is some elixir.